Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I compliment Deputy Browne on putting forward this motion in spite of criticism from some people who have the answers to everything. It is good that we have debated this issue three times since this Government was formed because it is a huge one. I invite the Minister of State to attend Mount Sion in Tipperary. Like the place Deputy Healy-Rae mentioned in Killarney, it is a lovely home, given freely. Friends of Mount Sion do much work there but the Minister wants to get the people out of it and bulldoze it. It is the job of some managers to design this. I will not say who is in charge on this island. The Minister of State knows who I am talking about, namely, the HSE.

Money has been allocated over the past five or six years but it has not been spent and has been returned to the Exchequer or taken by the senior Minister back into the Department of Health. That is a scandal.

I know cases of dual diagnosis. Dr. Harty and other medical people would know that is a very difficult diagnosis. I know 80 year old parents with a 45 year old son who has languished in a mental health institution with dual diagnosis for 12 months because there is no place for him. The nearest place for him is in Drogheda. I know a 25 year old who has been diagnosed with autism and slight mental health problems. He is in St. Luke’s in Kilkenny waiting for a place. There are no places. The Government attacked and ravaged services in St. Michael’s in Clonmel and closed it. Now the patients have to attend at the accident and emergency department. That is a traumatic experience for any of us, let alone for people having psychotic attacks. They are supposed to get transport to Kilkenny but if they attend there after 5 p.m., they have to wait until 9 a.m. the following morning to get a taxi. It is disgraceful.

There seem to be heartless people running this. It is nothing personal to the Ministers of State present. There seem to be heartless people with no feelings for the trauma, bullying and everything else going on running this. The services are being removed and stripped, despite the fact that, as in the housing crisis, this and that are promised.

There is a leakage of funding. Successive Governments have failed to ring-fence the funding. The mandarins in the Department have not ring-fenced it. They have taken it from mental health and put it back into the Exchequer. How mean can one be, when so many community facilities could do with some of that money, not all of it, as some Deputies have said? It could deal with some services for the ordinary people who need it. They are the most vulnerable people in society and we should all be indicted at the way they are being treated, and rightly so. It is inhumane, degrading and only due to the fact that plans are made and drawn up inside in offices. People get promotion on the basis of getting rid of these people from these places. They have no feeling of understanding of how the patients or their families are going to manage or can manage. It is heartless in the extreme.

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