Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Everyone in the House understands the need to improve our mental health services, particularly for young people. Everyone in this House understands how important mental health is. One of the positive things that has happened in the past number of years and decade is a much greater willingness by people to talk about mental health, to treat it seriously as an issue and to improve services. The question the Deputy asks is quite a valid one. It is not simply a case of resources. If the Deputy looks at the budget for mental health in 2012, the year after his party left office, he will see it was €711 million. This year it will be €853 million. In a period when budgets were very tight, the mental health budget increased by €140 million. The question we need to ask ourselves is why we are not getting better value for that investment and why we are not seeing significant improvements in services. The HSE has statutory responsibility for mental health services. There is a national director of mental health and a director general above the national director. Political responsibility rests with the Minister of State, Deputy Jim Daly, who is relatively newly appointed. He reports to the Minister, Deputy Harris, who reports to me. It is important to acknowledge there are unacceptable delays in people receiving the appointments they need. It is also equally important to acknowledge some of the progress that has been made. As I mentioned, there has been an increase in funding of €140 million a year since the Deputy's party left office. We now have the national forensic mental health hospital under construction in Portrane, which will allow us to close a very old facility in Dundrum. There have been improvements to counselling services, including new Jigsaw sites - one in Cork, which the Deputy will be familiar with, two in Dublin and one in Limerick. We are also seeing the continued development of community health teams and the child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS. Specifically on the issue the Deputy raised on psychology, approval has now been granted for additional staffing resources and this will include 114 additional assistant psychology posts. There has also been an increase in the intake of undergraduate nursing from 60 last year to 130 this year, which will more than double the number of undergraduate psychiatric nurses being recruited. It raises the fundamental question that we always run into when it comes to health, which is that more staff, resources and funding do not necessarily result in better services and outcomes. It is an area on which we will need to really focus in the years ahead.

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