James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In 1950 there were 7.9 psychiatric beds per 1,000 of our population. The Health Research Board records that the rate of involuntary admission in 2016 was 48.4% involuntary admissions per 100,000 of our population. In England, the rate in 2015-16 was 120. It is almost 2.5 times our rate. EUROSTAT reports that Ireland has the third lowest number of psychiatric beds per 100,000 of the population in the EU. The EU average is 72 psychiatric beds per 100,000 of the population and in Ireland the average is fewer than half that at just under 35 psychiatric beds per 100,000 of the population, a figure questioned by Professor Kennedy only last week to the effect that it might be artificially high. Professor Brendan Kelly states: "These are stark different differences and strongly suggest that Ireland has insufficient psychiatric beds to serve our population."

The closure of inappropriate psychiatric beds in Victorian hospitals was supported in A Vision for Change and rightly so, but are we gone too far in the other direction? Has decongregation effectively become an ideology or a method to cut costs? We are now putting people out of centres into the community where there are not the necessary services in place nor the proper step-down beds or the proper assisted living supports for them.

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