David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate that but it is certainly nowhere near enough for what is required. I have on many occasions, both in this Chamber and outside it, welcomed an awful lot of very good work done by both the Minister and the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, and I will always acknowledge where good work is done, good initiatives put in place and additional funding made available. Nevertheless, it is my job to call out, as is right to do, what I feel was a dreadful decision made by the Government and the Cabinet not to fund the health services properly and to starve them of any additional funding for new measures and new programmes.

We had a discussion earlier on the national stroke strategy and we are now talking about CAMHS. We all know CAMHS is not working. Far too many young people cannot get access to it. We have difficulty recruiting psychiatric consultants and allied healthcare professionals, and young people are going into emergency departments in the wrong places looking for care because they cannot get it in the service where they should get it, namely, CAMHS, and that is down to resources and capacity. Starving CAMHS of new funding to the extent we have done in this budget is wrong and will have consequences for people's mental health.

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