Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Reforming the delivery of mental health services must be central to the agenda of Government and Dáil Éireann over the next five years. Too many people are suffering alone with mental health issues and are not receiving the help and support they need from our health services.

In the recent election campaign Fianna Fáil's policy document, Improving Mental Health, which had been brought forward by then Deputy Colm Keaveney, outlined a community approach to the delivery of mental health services across the country. Fianna Fáil wants to see an enhanced focus on and greater resources for mental health services. For us mental health should be taken as seriously as physical health in the deployment of State resources. To that end, we committed to the establishment of a new national mental health authority to ensure that a single organisation is tasked with co-ordinating mental health services. At my party's Ard-Fheis in Killarney in 2014 I set out the case for a new authority:

Mental health issues continue to have a devastating impact on our society. The Ireland we want to build must commit itself to an all-out effort to help people and reduce the number of cases which end up in self-harm and suicide. In doing this we can learn from initiatives that have worked well in our country.

Since we established the Road Safety Authority it has helped halve deaths on our roads. That's more than 200 people a year whose lives are being saved.

We believe we can do the same in the field of mental health. That's why we are proposing the establishment of a National Mental Health Authority to be charged with leading an all-out national programme to promote positive attitudes to mental health and to reduce the incidence of self-harm and suicide.

Another motivation for me to establish this authority was the provision of funding for mental health services. As we said in our policy document, it has become a cliché that mental health has been and remains the Cinderella of the health service. Far too often money is pulled from mental health in order to shore up other areas of the health service, and we have seen it again in 2016.

The 2016 HSE service plan says: "€58.5m is being held by the Department of Health (DoH) for further new initiatives and will be released during the year as specific implementation plans are agreed". It goes on to say:

The €58.5m being held by the DoH relates to specific initiatives in the areas of mental health €35m, primary care €13.5m, therapy services for young people €8m, and the nursing taskforce pilot implementation €2m. The release of these funds will be approved as specific implementation plans are agreed during the year. The HSE will use €20m in time related savings from these planned initiatives, on a once off basis, to continue to provide the 2015 outturn levels of home care and transitional care beds, which is above the 2015 planned service level and up to a further €1.5m to put in place an advance purchase agreement in relation to vaccines.

In other words, €20 million is being used to keep older people's services at their 2015 level out of that allocation. Therefore, there was never any intention to allocate and spend an additional €35 million on mental health services in 2016. It was yet another case of spurious health budgeting by the outgoing Government. Last December, when the service plan was published, Colm Keaveney highlighted how this €35 million would not be fully spent in 2016, and in the Dáil last week the Minister for Health, Deputy Varadkar, outlined what was in the service plan, saying that "claims of some sort of raid are entirely inaccurate". That was true, as one cannot raid what has not been provided in the first place. However, many were given the impression that mental health services were being allocated €35 million extra in 2016, given that in the Department of Health press release that marked the publication of the service plan, the Minister of State, Kathleen Lynch, said, "The 2016 plan includes €35 million earmarked for the further development of mental health". This followed the budget day pledge that mental health would see a further increase in funding in line with the commitment in the programme for government.

Mental Health Reform, Ireland's leading national coalition of organisations campaigning to transform mental health and well-being supports in Ireland, believed and welcomed the budget announcement. Last week the director of Mental Health Reform, Dr. Shari McDaid, said the diversion of any mental health funding was unacceptable and should not be tolerated, and this week I understand members of Mental Health Reform will be demonstrating outside the Dáil, and rightly so. However, this can come as no surprise. The €35 million commitment was not honoured in Budget 2014 either, with €20 million allocated. As so often before, a cynical and spin-obsessed Government announced a funding increase that it knew would not happen.

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