Pa Daly (Kerry, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Valerie O’Sullivan, who has travelled from Tralee to be here. She can only be described as someone who has survived her treatment in CAMHS. Some other children in County Kerry and their parents, with whom I have spoken, must have laughed when they heard rhetoric about cherishing all children of the nation equally after, for example, scrambling around looking for a bed for their daughter with a life-threatening eating disorder. We see the physical and mental damage caused by overprescribing and over-medicating. Regarding children given anti-psychotic medication for relatively minor mental health difficulties, one child said it felt like she was in a cartoon with hallucinations and going around like a zombie when she only needed help for a sleep disorder. We see the loss of potential and the loss of family cohesion.

Since the Government came into power, waiting lists for CAMHS have increased by 86%. The number of children waiting longer than a year has increased by 168%. Coming up on the train this morning, I heard about the State strategy for defending nursing home charge claims. Last Monday week, as the news broke about the Mental Health Commission, the HSE gatekeepers, who are never slow to miss an opportunity, saw a good day to announce that it was going to carry out a full look-back review into the north Kerry cases. When looking into what was in the statement, the HSE said it was going to carry it out but that it would take what it described as a little time to put the clinical team in place. It should be remembered that this is from an organisation that said last October it would produce the north Kerry review in two weeks. The HSE said it would also need an independent expert to chair the review. We still do not have this expert. When I repeated a call for the review to stretch back over 15 years, the HSE said its priority was to review the young people currently under the care of the north Kerry CAMHS team, which is what the Mental Health Commission had already got earlier on that day, so a bit of a three-card trick was announced on that day.

I am calling for the HSE to review all the open cases, as is recommended by the Mental Health Commission; immediately regulate CAMHS under the Mental Health Act; reinstate a national clinical director to ensure accountability; most importantly, develop the national standards for monitoring anti-psychotic medication; and give us a timeframe for the review of all north Kerry cases going back over 15 years, particularly where Risperidone was prescribed. The children and people of north Kerry deserve no less than that.

See this speech in context