Frank O'Rourke (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State. I am a member of the task force but, unfortunately, I do not get to attend too many of the meetings because they overlap with proceedings in this House on a Tuesday. I thank the Minister of State for acknowledging it.

The difficulty with this is we are without a commitment for funding. While I respect and understand what the Minister of State has said in her statement, if we are serious about supporting people and providing such a valuable and worthwhile service, and that has been acknowledged by everybody at various levels all the way down the chain, why is there not a commitment in place to give it funding and start the funding stream for them? It is engaging with the task force, as the Minister of State has correctly pointed out, but it has engaged ad nauseam. It has followed that path through. Obviously, it will continue to attend the meetings but it has gone to the full process. It had an excellent system in place but to meet current guidelines it had to be tweaked, fine-tuned and modified. We engaged positively with the system to ensure the i's were dotted and the t's crossed. That is all in place. I have letters from the task force and the HSE confirming that the house is in order in this regard.

It is acknowledged that, with regard to 80 of the cases it is dealing with at present, if it was not there to see those people, under the heading of dual diagnosis and on individual mental health and drug addiction issues, it would probably be very difficult for those people to find a service anywhere else that would give them the notice and supports they are getting, and who knows where some of them would have ended up.

The point I am trying to focus on is that while everyone is committed, and I get that and I hear it, now we have to measure that commitment with funding. I am asking, two years on, when will this group be given a commitment that it will be included in the funding and it will get it, even on an incremental basis. Otherwise it cannot go on, and if it closes its doors it will put massive pressure and strain on a system that already cannot cope with the numbers it is getting, not to mention another 80 cases. We should work together to try to bring this over the line.

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