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

The Government has thrown in the towel on health and disastrously chosen to underfund the health service in this year's budget. Unfortunately, this will have a profound negative effect on patients, their families, workers and wider service provision, no more so than for those looking to access vital mental health services. Access to mental health services was in crisis before this budget and it will be in crisis after this budget.

It was widely reported that the Minister was disappointed with the health allocation in budget 2024, but there was no mention of disappointment in his opening speech.

Disappointment will be cold comfort for people who are waiting for vital mental health services.

It is welcome to see more resources going into CAMHS. That is badly needed but it does not go far enough. The highlight seems to be an app and a pilot project in one community healthcare organisation, CHO, area. To me it is just spin and an attempt to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The Minister can disagree with me all he wants but the facts do not lie. Some 6,400 children have presented to accident and emergency departments with mental health difficulties since he took office, including almost 1,000 children this year. Over 2,500 of these children have been hospitalised. This is a direct consequence of successive Governments failing to invest in early intervention. Waiting lists for CAMHS reached a record of over 4,500 children this year. The figure has more than doubled in the three years since the Minister took office. Some 735 of these children have been waiting for more than a year for an initial appointment. That is a 209% increase under the Minister's watch. Primary care psychology services have over 16,000 young people waiting for appointments. Jigsaw services have wait times of up to 15 weeks in some areas and children in CAMHS who are at a high risk of suicidal ideation or deliberate self-harm are having to wait up to 190 days for an assessment.

The Minister can feel free to stop me if he feels these facts are wrong. If he does not believe me, he should believe the damning report into CAMHS by the Mental Health Commission and the Maskey report under this Government's reign. He should also believe the Ombudsman for Children, who joined calls from parents and Opposition parties in response to the State's dereliction of its duty to children. The letter he wrote was shocking. The Ombudsman for Children did not receive an urgent, credible and serious response outlining how these unsustainable situations will be resolved. These issues will still not be resolved after the recent budget. This has all happened on the Government's watch. The Government may have inherited some problems from the previous Fine Gael Government but nothing it has done has addressed these problems.

The Government is out of ideas and it is running out of time. We need solutions to this emergency but every waiting list is going in the wrong direction; all of them are going up. Sinn Féin has solutions to the crisis in youth mental health. We have prioritised CAMHS inpatient capacity to fully resource all CAMHS teams in our alternative budget. This would provide a much-needed service to young people with moderate to severe mental health needs. We have also prioritised early intervention, with a move towards universal counselling, GP referral and expanding Jigsaw. Sinn Féin has solutions and the longer this Government is in place, the worse this emergency will get.

I spent the recess meeting a vast range of mental health organisations. They do a really good job, despite working in difficult circumstances. They all stress the need for multi-annual funding and early intervention. This budget will simply not address these issues. It is unforgivable that the Government has failed to invest in the development of national clinical programmes for mental health for the second year running. This means there will be no funding for self-harm and suicidal ideation. In the past three years, 23,000 people have presented to 25 hospitals with suicidal ideation. That is an average of 15 presentations per day.

Specialist eating disorder teams are life-saving and to find out there is no additional funding again this year is concerning. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric diagnosis. The Government's failure to resource early intervention psychosis is a blatant disregard of its duty of care to those experiencing mental health difficulties. We also have no funding for adult ADHD, which means that more children will fall through the gaps when they transition from CAMHS into adult services. We need to fund these programmes. I am concerned about the year ahead and how people will access care.

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