Dr. Niall Muldoon:

Exactly, it has shown the opposite. I wrote for four or five years to different Ministers who kept pushing me around in circles and said it was up to somebody else. They then said they were waiting for legislation, and I have been told clearly that it could be done administratively. We do not need legislation to do those sorts of things. Ultimately, they could not agree on who would be the person leading the show. That is one area.

The second area is the children's budget. There is no child-specific budget. Again, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child says that every government should have child-specific budgets so that we know what is going on. Within health, they cannot tell us what they spend on children. They can tell us that roughly €1.5 billion is going to spent on mental health. Our best guess is that approximately €300 million of that will be spent on children's mental health, but that is only a guess. The reason we do not get a specific figure is that it allows it a slush fund to move into acute beds or somewhere else if it needs to. However, €300 million for children's mental health is less than 0.01% of the health budget, and we know that 75% of all people with mental health issues start experiencing them in adolescence. We need to know the data. We need to know what Departments are doing so that we can measure it, change things and see what is effective.

It is also that idea that we do not listen to children. We do not hear what they are saying and take their solutions. Their solutions are simple a lot of the time. We know exactly every penny of what we spent on the children's hospital because it is bricks and mortar, but we do not know what we spend on children. We helped with a survey or consultation with children in Children's Health Ireland in 2017. Children had never been surveyed for their views within Children's Health Ireland at that stage. One answer that came back from a child asked if we could change the height of the light switch because they were scared to get out of bed at night to go to the toilet. These are simple things. Listening to children makes sense across the board. That is why, if we incorporate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the man or woman who works in the Department of agriculture, who may never meet a child, still has to think about being child's rights compliant. They could end up in the Department of education. Every system works together, because if they do not work together and do not think of child's rights compliance, they can be sued. The lawsuit is not the answer, but what is happening in other countries where that incorporation has happened is that the lawsuit is resolved much better than it is here. A much better solution comes out of it. A judge in Ireland will say, "That is all right, that is okay for Johnny," but they do not look at the system. If you took a lawsuit when there is the incorporation, they will say that might work for Johnny but it is not going to work for the whole system, so the whole system has to be changed. If that is the outcome of a lawsuit, the system will start to change itself a lot earlier. That is the rationale.