Michael Harty (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am glad this debate is being carried out in a calm and constructive manner. The motion has several objectives, including the full implementation of A Vision for Change, which is ten years old. It is astounding that we are still trying to implement that document ten years after it was published. It recognises the financial requirements to complete A Vision for Change as €177 million, €35 million a year yet only €15 million is being provided to deliver new services in 2017. It calls for a review of this inadequate spending and for multi-annual budgeting. It is emerging from the Committee on the Future of Healthcare that we need multi-annual budgeting to be able to plan constructively for the future as planning from year to year with inadequate budgets will not provide the best results. It also calls for the unspent financial allocation for mental health services to be retained within the mental health budget and not returned to the Exchequer and spent elsewhere. It is quite unacceptable that over many years funding for mental health services has been promised but not delivered. Kathleen Lynch, when she was Minister of State with responsibility for mental health services, was promised funding on several occasions which was withdrawn from her by the then Minister for Health, Senator James Reilly. The former Minister for Health, Deputy Varadkar, removed €12 million from the mental health budget prior to the formation of this Government. The pattern is being repeated which sends out the wrong message, that mental health funding can be siphoned off to other areas of the health service under the guise that it cannot be spent in the current year. We know, however, that many areas of the health service are crying out for funding. There are many voluntary organisations that supply mental health services which would give their eye teeth to get their hands on this funding. They collect money on a voluntary basis and if they had this funding they would target its use.

I propose that any funding allocated to mental health services which cannot be spent in the current year should be set aside to buy services in a manner similar to that of the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, which buys medical and surgical services for those on long waiting lists. Such a fund should be set up for the mental health services. It would supply services to those who are homeless and suffer from mental illness and drug addiction, address our unacceptable suicide and attempted suicide rates and provide counselling, psychological and cognitive behaviour therapy services, mental health services for young people through the child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, and dementia services. If money is unspent and I am sure it was hard fought for in the budget, it should be set aside for a mental health purchase fund using unused funds to buy services from the private sector. I would like the Minister of State to consider that.

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