Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There is no doubt that there are good people doing good work in County Meath, for which we applaud them, but they are dealing with a tsunami of need. A Vision for Change is really important, but if we do not have the funds we meed for change, it is not worth the paper on which it is written. In County Meath we have three Ministers or Ministers of State in various guises, as well as two Fianna Fáil backbenchers, but we are not getting the funding we need. County Meath remains an outlier because of the number of vacancies in critical health care service grades. It is also an outlier because of the lack of funding.

Does the Minister of State not agree that it is really hard for these healthcare professionals to function and carry out their job regarding the level of need they face if they do not have the adequate resources to do so? Given the current state of the economy, the State has an opportunity to intervene in so many individuals' lives, to bring people back to good mental health and to ensure they do not end up thinking that suicide is some kind of solution to their situation. However, we can only do this if we have feet on the ground and the funds available for them to do their job. Despite the rhetoric we hear year after year, the figures are getting worse. I looked at the figures recently. The rate of self-harm in 2016 was 10% higher than it was in 2007, the year before the economic recession. The rate was highest among the young. One third of children's mental health beds in the country are closed at present due to staff shortages in child and adolescent mental health units. There are vacancies for psychiatric nurses while 52 children have been waiting more than a year for an assessment for child and adolescent mental health services. If we must tell a child not to come near us for 12 months before we will even talk to him or her regarding mental health services, we are failing those children radically.

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