Ms Fiona Kearney:

There are two pieces for me in terms of the community mental health. The first is in response to both Deputy Ward and Senator Ruane. When you think about the lack of access to the community disability networks, when you think about primary care psychology, when you think about CAMHS, and Senator Ruane's piece around the over-representation of neurodivergent people in prison, as we know, they are all linked. Because we do not get access, it manifests in behaviour, it manifests in criminal behaviour then and we lock people up. I am not interested in moaning about what is not working. I am interested in solutions. I have offered two already today in terms of a case management approach with youth work services and the community mental health model.

There is something else that responds to this piece here and I have spoken to St. Ultan's about this. It is about multidisciplinary teams wrapped around the primary schools and the early years services. If you wanted to pilot one, St. Ultan's would be the place to do it. We are talking about speech and language therapists, occupational therapists and psychologists in and wrapped around the schools. When they get their two-year-olds in to the early years services and they are starting to screen for those needs, we are in there early and we have a team of specialists. We are piloting this in the Department of Education with OT and speech and language therapists. We do not have psychologists there. We need to add them to the package. We need to pilot it in St. Ultan's with all of the issues for Cherry Orchard. That would solve a lot of the issues around disability network access, etc. That is one piece of the puzzle for me.

The second piece is dealing with trauma and inter-generational trauma. A community model of that is what we are operating. We only can operate this one day a week working with six families at a time. It is basically trauma therapy; it is not trauma-informed therapy, it is recovery from trauma. If people need to shake in the room with a skilled therapist to release trauma, a mixed modality offers ways of doing it. We are working with a skilled family therapist, Ms Joy Winterbotham, who is delivering this for us. We would like to develop that to having a family therapist, an adult psychotherapist and children's play therapists to work with the whole family because the family has sub-systems. All communities need this. There is focus on the parent-child relationship, direct work with children and direct work with couples. If you think about domestic violence, we are working with the mammy and her children all the time. We need to work with the daddy. We need to work with dad because he will always have contact with his children and children will want that relationship with their dad, and then they will go on to have other partners as well. We need to resolve trauma. We need to ensure that those relationships can be functioning relationships. For us, it is about a trauma therapy centre in a community so that we do not need to get to CAMHS level. They can be prescribed by CAMHS if they need something but they need to do their recovery work somewhere.

This is really important for us and is two-fold. It is about early intervention multidisciplinary teams wrapped around schools and early years services and it is about a trauma therapy centre to deal with inter-generational trauma.