Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge that work is being done and the small amount of €15,000 that has been given for the training programme. Anything is welcome. It is a pilot programme and I wish it every success. Some of the recommendations cannot be addressed by the suicide prevention and community engagement team, SPACE, programme in Ballyfermot, which was set up specifically to address this report because some of the underlying issues are bigger and deeper and, as the Minister of State outlined, some people did not reach out to the mental health services. In other cases they did, and the problems persisted. Housing is one of the key issues. I am a Deputy for 18 years and in recent years I have seen more adult women and men break down in front of me in floods of tears because of the housing crisis in their lives. Unless that is addressed we will struggle to address the problem of suicide. I hope we will never see what I saw last year, which was the fear and anxiety in a community that had seen a number of women die in very harrowing and public circumstances. That affected entire communities.

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