Jim Daly (Cork South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

If we enhance community supports and services as well as increase and make more widely available lower level supports, we can prevent many of these cases escalating to the acute level. For too long, too much of the debate and focus has been on the extreme end of mental health. We need to build a community base, give assistant psychologists and therapists an increased role and deal with these issues as they emerge rather than after they have moved to being acute. Putting all of the focus on the acute end and building with that in mind is not the solution. We must reorient our direction and planning towards community supports and community teams, which is the policy that we are pursuing.

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