Fiona O'Loughlin (Fianna Fail)
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I would like to put a few questions to the representatives. It was incredibly interesting and concerning listening to all of them. There are not too many surprises because, as has been pointed out by some of my colleagues, we tend to hear quite often about the challenges and issues in mental health services when it comes to responding to our young people. We are focusing on third level, what we need to embed in future funding to try to ensure well-being and supports for those who need them, and making those recommendations to the Minister.

I was alarmed by what Mr. Smyth said about the very large disparity between the funding for trainee clinical psychologists and that for counselling and educational training psychologists. I was certainly not aware of that. I would like him to address why that is. In response to one of my colleagues, he talked about a benchmark of one psychologist per 1,000 students. In 2020, there were 245,000 students at second level. I imagine it is close enough to that at present. How many psychologists are there at the moment? If there are 245,000 students, I would have thought from listening to Ms Murphy that we need more than the 23% increase she said happened in Trinity. Is there a problem getting the data? She said she does not have sufficient data to make the recommendation. Will she address that first?