Colm Keaveney (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This morning's action is as a direct result of a political decision not to proceed with the opening of a facility in Ballinasloe - a €3.2 million spend on a brand-new unit and the only ligature-free unit in the HSE. It was never opened and the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, transferred services and centralised them around Galway University Hospital, GUH.

The unit has been described by the health and safety official on site as a creaking, leaking and subsiding unit. It is held up with RSJs and there is water coming down on walls. Staffing levels had been unacceptable. We have highlighted this consistently in this House for the past 14 months but we were accused of scaremongering. In fact, in the Irish Examineron 20 February 2014, the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, said the Opposition was "scaremongering". She stated the changes "would liberate the service users" with an environment of "calm". This is a unit in which 36 assaults on staff took place already this year. The Department underspent the budget by €6 million last year and it was lost in the black hole of overspends across the public health service.

I am glad the senior Minister is here. I do not know whether it due a lack of confidence in the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, but I can tell him that the front-line staff in GUH have no confidence in the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch. According to a statement by the Department of Health on 22 May of last year, the "Minister of State with responsibility for Mental Health, Kathleen Lynch TD, today affirmed her view that acute mental health services at the University College Hospital Galway are being delivered safely and that the overall re-configuration of services in the Galway-Roscommon region is in the best interests of services users."

The reconfiguration of services across Roscommon, Mayo and Galway is a disaster. There is a brand-new facility sitting idle in GUH but the Minister would rather herd the most vulnerable people to an accident and emergency unit so that they can be triaged, if they are lucky, to get into a psychiatric unit, where water comes down on the walls and which has been described as a creaking unit.

This was a political decision. The front-line staff have not been listened to nor has the Opposition but the crusade continues. In the past two years, we have seen a €70 million underspend in mental health - the greatest public health crisis of our generation. Would the Minister explain that?

See this speech in context