Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this important matter. I acknowledge the genuine attempts that have been made by the Minister of State, Deputy Daly. We now have a newly designated Jigsaw service in Thurles, which I warmly welcome. However, I am worried about the timelines. We need to see it set up and it is already five years late. That said, I have expressed my concerns and the Minister of State will know they are shared by Fr. Michael Toomey, who he has met and for whom he has great respect. Fr. Toomey has done tremendous work. The morning after the Minister of State's visit on Tuesday morning, he was on radio with Joe Leahy and another speaker, and those three people are at the coalface. While they welcomed Jigsaw, they want to see it rolled out in other towns like Clonmel and Carrick-on-Suir, and in villages like Kilsheelan and Ballyporeen, and right up to Tipperary town and west Tipperary, which is in a bad state regarding mental health services, and on to north Tipperary. It is a big county and those areas need it.

Fr. Michael Toomey officiated at a mass last week for my closest neighbour, Paul Ryan, who ended his own life after suffering for 40 years with mental health issues. He was a tutor in Cluain, a voluntary organisation for people with certain disabilities. He was a wonderfully skilled craftsman, a potter, and we can see his last pottery and all the work he had done in the midst of his mental illness. We could see the profound sense of shock and sadness in the church that afternoon, with all the service users of Cluain and his colleagues there. The man thought he was only going to have a few at its funeral and he made a request that the few who were there would be asked back to the pub. The pub could not hold them. The biggest church in Clonmel could not hold the crowds, such was the impact. He was a wonderful man, gone too early from his wonderful wife and two daughters. It is so sad. It is an epidemic. I can only think of what he went through. As I said, we never had a nicer neighbour in our lives. He was a lovely, wonderful, helpful man. He helped so many people and it came back to him in spades, but he thought he was in such a dark place that nobody wanted to have any interest in him, although thousands had. It is so sad.

We now have interventions and organisations in Clonmel like Jigsaw and C-Saw, another wonderful group which has a quiz tonight in the Hillview Sports Club. Former councillor, Joe Leahy, and May Walsh, who works in my office, and many volunteers are out fundraising every night to support these services, such as drop-in services and confidential lines. The people out there want to do this. The Minister of State heard about a service in Nenagh, which I am ashamed to say I have not seen yet but I must visit, as should the Minister of State. Again, this is run by volunteers from the bottom up.

As Deputy Connolly asked, what happened to A Vision for Change? We had the vision, we got the change and we closed all of the beds, but we got none of the state-of-the-art services we were promised. As I said to the Minister of State at the meeting, we were not badly burned in Tipperary, we were scalded. We lost St. Michael's unit and the Minister of State has admitted it was wrong to take it away from us. We do not have a single long-stay bed. The crisis houses are struggling to get two extra beds and the HSE and the Minister of State have accepted there is a difference of at least 20 beds. We need ten of those in south Tipperary and ten in north Tipperary. North Tipperary patients have to go to Ennis. I will not even mention what happened in Kilkenny. Above all, I cannot understand for the life of me, with a new 40-bed modular unit about to open in St. Joseph's unit at South Tipperary General Hospital, Clonmel, why we cannot have a room there so people do not have to sit through the trauma and disturbance of a mad accident and emergency unit, which is over-packed and crazy, with all of the staff under pressure. Fr. Michael Toomey told us eloquently last week about visiting there and waiting with a patient. I salute him and the other clergy of all denominations. He waited and waited but there was no bed for a patient who was on a trolley. It is not acceptable that these people have to be put through such suffering. I want to highlight these concerns.

There are many people who have worked tirelessly and collaboratively over the last seven years to ensure we have a service like Jigsaw. The Minister of State was at pains to point that out, although some politicians could not wait to have it announced. It is not about announcements. It is about the duty of care to our fellow human beings. This is a positive outcome. I acknowledge the concerns that are emerging in terms of the accessibility of the Jigsaw service because the county is so big and, while there is good access from Dublin, there are poor transport networks throughout the county. That is why it is vital that outreach hubs are developed in parallel with the development of the main unit.

We know Jigsaw caters specifically for young people between the ages of 12 and 25 who are experiencing difficulties with mental health. These are the groups who are being particularly affected by the scourge of rampant drug use and misuse in our county, and it is vital they have accessible services. I know the Minister of State will agree with me about social drug taking, in particular the taking of cocaine by people of all types as recreation at weekends - our own equals as well as those we would not associate with. It is now very common, which is shocking and frightening. It has to be tackled. We know the violence and the abuse that goes on with drug cartels and gangs. It is not all right to take cocaine as it is supporting mobsters and gangsters, who should be taken off our streets.

They are raining terror on the country, including Clonmel and the other villages in my county. This is why I hope the Jigsaw service can be expanded throughout all the towns and villages. We need them from north to south, whether they take the form of a mobile service or whatever else. I do not know how we might do it but we just cannot have that long distance because people will not and cannot travel it.

Last February, the report on St. Luke's psychiatric facility in Kilkenny was published. It revealed a litany of appalling hygiene and service provision failures. I do not even want to repeat them here. The HSE was fined and brought to court. It admitted liability. That is like rubbing butter on a fat cow's you-know-what. Who is paying the fine? The taxpayers. It means nothing. Can anyone in the HSE be held accountable? I said this to the Minister of State the other day in the building in which we had the meeting. My wife was a nurse in the former St. Luke's Hospital. I used to visit it with the chairman of the council. I was there for Christmas parties. It is all closed now. There were a couple of hundred patients there at the time. St. Michael's, on the other side of the main hospital, contained the short-term and long-stay places where people had to go. People with these issues, sadly, will need places from time to time in their lives and ongoing treatment. Now all of St. Luke's is offices, offices and more offices. We had to run the health service when we did not have those offices. They were hospitals. Up the road, in Cashel, €22 million was spent on Our Lady's hospital before it was closed down. What is in it now? Not one bed. It is a patient-free zone. It is just offices, offices, offices. That, again, was a functioning hospital. I had my appendix taken out there. I was there a few times when I was young. They took even the lift out of it to ensure that no patient could go upstairs. It is desecration and vandalism, and this is carried on by the HSE. We had that big hospital, the 300 patients in St. Luke's, the 40 or so beds in St. Michael's, and Our Lady's. That adds up to probably 700 patients. We did not have all these offices and management to run those hospitals but we had the matrons, and my God should we bring them back. The hospitals were clean. When the matrons were in charge, there would not have been a report such as came out on St. Luke's. We can do nothing in here only attack the clergy and the Vatican and whoever else day in, day out. These people gave us our education and our health service. They were visionaries who went all over the world and looked after people, set up field hospitals and did wonderful work, and all we want every day in the midst of our housing crisis and our mental health epidemic is to attack the people and institutions that served us all so well. I hope to God people might realise sooner rather than later the folly of their ways.

Getting back to the services, I will make a contrast with the Minister of State. The Minister, Deputy Harris, came down and saw the situation in Cashel. We saw offices - plush offices, I might add, with colour-coded carpet and the finest of paintings on the walls - yet we do not have a bed for a patient suffering a psychotic attack tonight. Such a patient must be left sitting on a chair. The Minister of State told us we cannot have trolleys, and then there is what happened in Waterford recently. We have all these offices and officials and so on and no services. There is something rotten in the system. When these were functioning hospitals, we had nurses, doctors, attendants and so on - very good people. Now we have legions of staff - I will not call them battalions because they do not go to battle - and what are they doing? They are pushing paper from here to there to wherever else and pushing it back again. That is what is wrong. There is nothing else wrong. The Minister of State talked about the funding increasing from €700 million to €1 billion but it is being gobbled up by administration. It is sad. The HSE has many good people, but many of the chiefs are self-serving and cannot see what is going on on the ground. There are none so blind as those who do not want to see at all. It is so sad.

In Clonmel, we have the likes of Fr. Michael Toomey and the other priests in the area, C-SAW and the volunteers. I should also mention the River Suir Suicide Patrol and TaxiWatch. I was out late in Clonmel last Friday night, at 3.20 a.m., and met three women going off to walk the quays to ensure people were kept out of the river. It is so sad. They have to do it. We have all this administration using all this money yet no services. I know that the Minister of State is doing his best and will soon retire from politics, but the system is badly broken. A Vision for Change was to be the Bible, according to John Moloney, who was Minister of State at the time, and the former Minister of State, Kathleen Lynch, but it all collapsed. The book was closed and left there. All the services were taken away with all the hospitals closed. The Government told us the doors of these Dickensian places would be opened up and all the patients let out - to hell or to Connacht. Then no services - absolutely zilch - were put in in Tipperary. I salute the front line, the Psychiatric Nurses Association of Ireland, the nurses and the other groups, including the community care services. There is something very badly wrong, though, and someone needs to fix it.

See this speech in context