Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I also welcome the opportunity to contribute on this issue. I will pick up where Deputy Neville left off and commend the Ceann Comhairle. He promoted some excellent initiatives last year together with Dr. John Hillery and several others from the College of Psychiatrists Ireland on mental health and mindfulness. I reiterate all of the calls for the cross-party mental health group to be made a full committee of the House. I have been listening to the debate and it is apparent that it is not just an issue for the Department of Health; it involves education, sport, rural affairs and every other Department. If we do not have a single overarching committee doing fantastic work supervising that and monitoring it, then we will continue to have a silo mentality and people will get lost. This is an all-party approach and we need a committee to oversee matters.

I compliment my colleague, Deputy Browne, who since 2016 has brought significant energy to the issue within our party but also in pursuing budgetary allocations. Were it not for his persistence, money would not have been ring-fenced for mental health services this year during the negotiations for the budgets for 2018 and 2019.

One good thing is that there is now a much greater awareness of mental health and much less stigma attached to approaching services for help. However, the services were designed for a different era. They have not caught up with demand or with the change in respect of early diagnosis.

Deputy Neville referred to consultants. We still have a major problem attracting consultants of any discipline to come to Ireland under the 2012 contract introduced by the then Minister, Senator James Reilly. As long as that contract remains in place, there will continue to be vacancies. This is not just an issue for mental health services, it applies across the board and we have to face up to that. There is international competition for healthcare professionals, but we are exporting some of the best trained professionals in the world to Australia and Canada. I spoke to some of them in recent weeks when they were home for Christmas. They want to come home, but they will not do so while the contract to which I refer and the conditions in which they would be obliged to work remain in place. We can fill these vacancies with our people. It will not take a huge amount of money to revisit the issue of the contract. There must be an awakening in the Department of Health in that regard.

The role of social media in childhood and adolescent mental health issues is absolutely extraordinary. I would not like to be a teenager in the current era. It is tough enough to be a teenager at any time, but teenagers today must contend with the ubiquity of phones. During the week, I heard my colleague, Councillor Cathal Crowe, talking about the latest craze on Snapchat. Random fights on school buses are being recorded and posted online. That is having an impact. Pressure is being put on people in a way it never was before in the context of how they should look, how they should sound and to whom they should listen. It is extraordinary. We have to ensure that our services understand and are equipped to deal with this and that professionals within the services have an understanding of the impact of social media on daily lives. Constant and aggressive training and reskilling are needed to keep ahead of these crazy practices. The social media companies can no longer wash their hands of this. We need more than just a Government response. All the social media companies - these are multi-billion euro firms - must invest and take responsibility for the content that goes on their sites.

There is massive frustration among people. It is different in different regions. There is no sense of co-ordination and the CHOs operate like silos. The CHO in my area is facing many challenges but the people on the ground are working incredibly hard. We still have one consultant psychologist post which has been approved but not filled, posts for doctors in training that have not been filled and posts for two social workers that have been approved and not filled. The CAMHS inspection report from July indicates that an additional nine occupational therapists and 18 social workers are required. That is the shortfall in just three counties. I could go through the list. Until we tackle the recruitment crisis in the healthcare sector generally, we can have all the statements, good intentions and support for services that we like but to no effect. We have to fix that first, and then the Minister of State can start building a service that will deliver.

I will finish where I began by stating that the Ceann Comhairle has done a massive amount of work. I encourage him to encourage the Business Committee to place the Joint Committee on the Future of Mental Health Care on a permanent footing. All parties would support such a development. The kind of resources that the Committee on Public Accounts and other committees have must be allocated in respect of the joint committee in order to get it up and running and give it teeth.

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