Kathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour)

One of the most startling things we have managed to do is to ring fence that money. However, the money in itself would have been useless if we did not manage to get the 414 posts as well. That is what is going to be important.

We are about to reach our target this year in respect of the increase in bed capacity for child and adolescent services, with the opening of eight new beds in Cork, Galway and Dublin, and the 40% decrease in admissions of children to the adult psychiatric services. The compound distress of having one's child admitted to an adult psychiatric unit must be unbearable.

Every single multidisciplinary team will now have one person from each profession. That will be crucially important because until now, I kept hearing that we had 126 multidisciplinary teams or 61 multidisciplinary teams in respect of child and adolescent services, but when we dug deep, we found that they might consist of a psychiatrist and a psychiatric nurse. Having one of each profession in that multidisciplinary team will have the type of effect that we all want. I thank the Deputy for raising this.

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