Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Guím gach rath ar an mbeirt Aire Stáit nua. Tá jab an-tábhachtach le déanamh ag an mbeirt acu. Guím gach beannacht orthu. When one lives in a town that has a river running through it, the sound of the search and recovery chopper coming over the town brings fear into every house. The closer one lives to the river, the more clearly one can see the Air Corps crew of the chopper as they fly over the river, with the heat-seeker going up the river, looking for somebody who has sadly ended his or her life.

There are other ways to look for people but that is the most public way. It is the one thing that frightens people who live along a river. We all need to work collectively to bring an end to that. The figure of 554 people who ended their lives through suicide has to come down. My party has proposed the establishment of an authority similar to the Road Safety Authority with ring-fenced funding so that civil servants do not get to play with the budget to suit their needs and we do not have a repeat of the €12 million reallocation incident a few weeks ago.

As a country, we need to collectively change our mindset. Deputies John Lahart and Margaret Murphy O'Mahony touched on the fact that this issue is one for all of us. Our mental health is as important as our physical health and in the same way we treat our physical health, we must treat our mental health. I believe young people are leading the way on this and I really want to acknowledge the work that young people did to initiate the Mindspace project in Mayo. It was a team of volunteers, led by Breda Ruane from the Mayo Education and Training Board, which involved young teenagers in transition year from around the county, who put the legwork in to create Mindspace in Mayo. It is a kind of recreation of the Jigsaw project in Galway, which does fantastic work. We need to invest in the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, CAMHS, and in the rolling out of the CAMHS model across the country. More importantly, we need to roll it out consistently. Geography should not dictate what level of service, what access to service or what speed of service one gets. There should be a consistent model of CAMHS across the country.

Similarly, that is why restoring guidance counselling is so important in secondary schools. There is a generation that has a notion of guidance counselling as being the career guidance teacher we all spoke to. It is a much broader and more holistic concept than that. It is the person in the school who identifies and works with young people who are going through issues and it is in school that one is more prone to such issues. A proper, functioning guidance counsellor in place will start to work with people who come under mental health pressure at school from an early age. It is important to get them into the service at an early age. As we all know, early intervention is absolutely crucial.

Why do we still force people to go through the old accident and emergency system to get emergency mental health cover? One does not want to be in the accident and emergency department. If one is under physical pressure, one has to be. However, if one is under mental pressure or mental stress, it is the last place one needs to be. We need to roll out a system of proper 24-hour emergency mental health care around the country. Again, geography should not dictate service or access. As long as we push people through the accident and emergency system, many will leave it, not go through it and, as a result, will not have that recovery experience or receive the kind of coverage that we have. An issue that was raised in the last Dáil by the health committee was that we, as public representatives, and our staff need training on how to deal with constituents who come to us.

I fully agree with Deputies Mick Wallace and Clare Daly that we have stirred up a major problem in this country. If we think we have problems now with our mental health, the events in family homes across the country in the past eight or nine years will store up a further avalanche of problems, unless we decide to invest properly in people from an early age and decide to take this seriously. Geography should not dictate what service one gets, whether one goes private or public, or whether one can recover from an incident quicker than otherwise. As Deputy Lahart said, we are all only one incident away from a mental health crisis. Nobody is immune to it. We need to embrace it and work at it as a country, as public representatives and ultimately, as a Government.

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