Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I also congratulate the three Ministers on their appointments. I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the debate. I refer to the €12 million that was to be assigned to the mental health budget this year. This was bravely and hard fought for by my friend and colleague, Ms Kathleen Lynch, the former Minister of State. That money cannot be allowed to fall back into the black hole of general health spending. It is a relatively minuscule amount in the context of the overall spending on health but it is very important for people whose mental health is fragile. I urge the Government to put that money back into the mental health budget.

Since the beginning of the drive to ring-fence money for the development of mental health services in 2012 under Ms Lynch's passionate and determined stewardship, the money has been used to fund support for community organisations working on suicide prevention, education of GPs on suicide prevention, a primary care counselling service, access to psychology and psychotherapy services, additional beds for CAMHS, clinical nurse specialists to respond to those who present with self-harm in accident and emergency departments, a national clinical programme for eating disorders, training in behavioural family therapy and the roll-out of Jigsaw, a particularly positive development that has been mentioned on previous occasions when this issue has been debated in the House.

I had the opportunity to visit Jigsaw in Galway a few years ago. Funding was provided under this ring-fenced money to roll out Jigsaw, a young person-friendly service, in two areas in Dublin, two areas in Cork and one in Limerick. Jigsaw is a service that young people can walk into. I know from visiting the Galway centre several years ago that it has given young people the opportunity to have a place they feel they can go to when they are concerned about mental health issues. I spoke about community organisations being funded. Much of this has gone into youth services. Limerick Youth Service was recently allocated funding for its youth mental health programmes.

I have read out a list of areas where this ring-fenced funding was used in the past number of years. It is simply unacceptable that this progress in such a crucial area of the health service should be halted in any way. I ask the Ministers who are here today to give a commitment that this money will be restored. If it is not, there will be a sense that people are being let down, that services for vulnerable people have been underfunded for a long time under successive Governments and that the mental health area has been very much neglected. The signals will be wrong and the practical services that are being provided with this money will be underfunded.

Of the €12 million that was to be used this year, €5 million was to be used to recruit up to 100 psychologists and counsellors to develop psychological services for those under 18 in primary care. We must not fail to deliver this service. An analysis of the waiting list for acute mental health services for children and adolescents demonstrated that at least 20% of those waiting did not need an acute psychiatric service. A psychological or psychotherapy service would have been more appropriate but was not always available. Deputy Jonathan O'Brien made some points a few minutes ago about ensuring that the services that are available are the ones that are most appropriate. In many cases, these services are cheaper to deliver than some of the traditional services that are available, or unavailable in some cases because people cannot access them. It is important that we focus on this funding and that it continues in future years because the area has been very under-resourced and one-dimensional in the sense that a person sees a psychiatrist and everything flows from that whereas people sometimes need something that is more talk-based, more based in their community and more accessible to them. We cannot afford to go back on the progress that has been made.

I looked at the section on mental health in the programme for a partnership Government. While it takes up a few pages and refers to the Government being committed to meeting the recommendations in A Vision for Change, which is welcome, it is quite vague. Reference is made to reviews that will advise on certain things. I would like to see more specific commitments and I hope the new Minister will be able to work on ensuring that there are more specific and deliverable developments in this area. There is quite a lot of knowledge around what needs to be done but what we really need is implementation. While there are many good general aspirations in the programme for a partnership Government, many of them are less specific than most people would like.

I will refer briefly to education, an area in which I worked, and the importance of a positive culture that supports people's mental health and ensuring that bullying does not happen because that very often affects people's mental health in a very negative way. Schools are required to have anti-bullying policies. Much work is being done with organisations like BelongTo in respect of homophobic, transphobic and Internet bullying. In terms of a culture of nourishing people, inclusion and care in schools and society in general, there has been far more talk about mental health in a positive sense. This is very good and we need to continue doing that. However, there are still areas where people feel they are being singled out as being different and, therefore, when they have an issue, they find it very difficult to talk about it and feel they are still part of the organisation, community or school. We need to ensure that we continue with that work.

There is a commitment in the reform programme to making well-being a compulsory subject for the junior cycle by 2017. I look forward to seeing that implemented because well-being as a subject is about the whole person and physical and mental well-being. It encompasses many areas but if we can embed it in our young people along with a sense of responsibility for themselves and those around them, we will have a far more positive culture in which people feel that if they have mental health issues, they can engage very early on with somebody who can help them. This would be so much more positive than waiting until people have acute issues.

There are a number of other areas. We need to see far more linking of education, health and community services. I again urge that this ring-fenced funding be restored to the mental health budget and that we continue to ring fence funding for mental health developments because this is such a crucial area for so many people who still feel that their issues are not being responded to. Ireland is becoming economically strong and we need to ensure it is socially strong and that people who are not having their needs met can have them met.

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