Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I know two brothers living in Meath with serious mental health issues. One brother suffers from significant suicidal ideation. They are living in their father's local authority house at the moment. Their father died recently. They had been caring for their father in recent years but were not registered in the house. There is a major problem with housing in Meath. As a result, the local authority wants them out of the house as soon as possible. This is tearing them apart and is heightening their mental health difficulties.

I know another man in County Meath called John. He drove down the main road between Navan and Kells four years ago at dusk and crashed into cattle that had broken out of a farmer's field. The farmer was not insured; John only had third party insurance. He was left paraplegic as a result of the accident. He is paralysed from the waist down. He has been studying for a diploma. He receives physiotherapy and hydropool services on two other evenings. He gets home around 10 p.m. from his activities on those nights. As a result of cost changes to home help, he will now be refused services after 10 p.m. This 26 year old man is being told he has to go to bed at 9 p.m. every evening. His education, physiotherapy and independence have been destroyed with this effective curfew. As a result of this, there is a challenge to his mental health.

Last month, the HSE closed the 24-hour psychiatric unit in Navan. Two years ago Ardee and Navan had 55 beds between them but the new unit in Navan will see that figure reduced to 46 beds. Those beds are to serve a massively growing population of approximately 300,000 people. Community mental health teams were supposed to be boosted to backfill the loss of service but those personnel targets have not been met. Drogheda is not easily accessible by road or public transport for great swathes of County Meath. The common denominator in these three dire situations is a Government saying one thing with regard to mental health but failing to provide the key financial support to follow through.

See this speech in context