Mark Ward (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

In the limited time available to me, I will concentrate on mental health and the waiting lists for mental health. Currently, we are at a record high of 4,490 young people waiting for an appointment for child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS. Some 752 of these children have been waiting for more than a year for a mental health appointment. These are the figures I received at the end of March. I also received figures in February, because I have been mapping this for the last while, and the figures are only going one way. Between February and March, there was a 1.2% increase, but what really concerns me is that there was an 8.6% increase in the number of young people who were waiting for more than a year. It would be unacceptable for one child to be waiting for a mental health appointment for a year, never mind 752 people in this country. If a young person hurt their head or cut their head, they would be seen almost immediately, but if they had an issue going on inside their head, they would not get the same level of care. We need to see parity of care between mental and physical health.

CAMHS is for young people with moderate to severe mental health problems. The Minister of State, Deputy Butler, who, I must point out, is also not here tonight, has pointed out numerous times that the number of referrals has gone up, which has contributed to the increase in the waiting lists. Yet, what seems to have happened is that the Government cannot seem to join the dots. If children do not get intervention at the earliest stage, they will need more specialist treatments, such as CAMHS. At the moment, there are 11,000 young people waiting for an appointment with a primary care psychologist and 4,000 of these children have been waiting for more than a year. This is in primary care.

In some areas, there is a 30-week waiting list for Jigsaw. Under this Government emergency departments are inundated with the number of young people who are going to them with mental health crises. This has never happened before. We can all get lost behind statistics. As was mentioned, behind each one of those statistics is a young person who has a family. This ripple effect will go right through the family. This young person will have hopes, dreams and ambitions but they are being denied the opportunity to reach their full potential under this Government.

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