Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Ministers of State for the opportunity to speak. As always, my worry is not the commitment of the Ministers of State to their job. I know personally that they are focused on the issue of mental health. The difficulty is that consecutive governments, certainly in my political career, have paid lip service to the issue of mental health when it came to resourcing. We had A Vision for Change that we all rallied around and in its entire lifetime we managed to implement approximately 40% of it.

It is one of those popular subjects that all Deputies, county councillors, Senators and whoever else like to be associated with and say a few words on but once the debate is over that is the end of it. Within the HSE and the Department of Health, the first budget to be raided to facilitate some other aspect is always the mental health budget. I feel for the Minister of State in that respect because she has to fight hard to get whatever she manages to get.

I have lived experience of mental health complaints, as many of us will have but in recent months since Covid-19 has been around, the word "tsunami" has been mentioned and I have used it myself. Whether we are suppressing the figures - I am not accusing the Minister of State of doing that - or whether the news cycle is just so focused on Covid-19, we are not even touching the iceberg. I will tell one story that is accurate and that can be got from the archives of Ocean FM. The person in charge of Sligo town cemetery was giving an analogy on 8 September in which he was discussing, at that stage, deaths from Covid-19 that he had to cater for in the cemetery compared with other matters. I know we are in a much different place today but up to that point he had buried one person due to Covid-19 and ten people due to suicide since the previous March. I am sure Sligo is not unique in those sorts of figures.

I am not trying in any way to reduce or dilute the gravity of the Covid-19 situation or of all of the fatalities and the people who we have lost but people's mental health has come second. In the National Rehabilitation Hospital, admissions through incidences of attempted suicide were 17% compared with 1% during the same period in the previous year. In speaking to young people, including 16 year olds through to students in college, the words I am hearing are "despair", "frustration", "depression" and "anger". They have a sense of having lost their rights of passage on so many things, whether it was a summer job, a J1 visa to the United States, the driving test or so many others. I mention elderly people and Age Action is reporting that up to 40% of those presenting to the mental health services for the first time are elderly people. We feel it ourselves and we are the lucky ones who are able to go to the Dáil every week and to our offices and we are busy on our phones trying to help constituents. What about the 16 year old who has not been out since many months ago or the 82 year old who cannot go and visit friends or family?

The Minister of State will know I have been critical of our approach to the entire Covid-19 process in terms of the lack of a strategy. We need a strategy on mental health from now on as we emerge from this process. Hopefully we will get vaccines right because there is a tsunami. It is already out there but nobody is talking about it. I know the Minister of State is aware of it but I suspect, like all of her predecessors in my political career, she is getting the runaround and the lip service to say that it is an important issue and it will be dealt with. The Minister of State should fight harder and make sure there is an appropriate strategy in place for the tsunami and emergency we are already in.

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