Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Government's response is a nonsense. A programme for Government commitment remains unacted upon. We are expected to simply wait because the Government is promising an all-singing, all-dancing Bill, and it promises us that it will be better than what we have, but nobody has seen it. I do not think that is good enough and it is no reason to not support this legislation. We could work with this through Committee Stage, absolutely, and I am sure there are elements that can be worked upon, but there is no reason to delay the passage of this Bill, given how long it has been promised.

The system is in crisis and getting worse. I was just looking at the numbers for my own community health organisation, CHO, area. We talk about statistics and while these are so much more, they do tell a story. There are 574 more people waiting now than there were in July 2020, and there are 348 children in Cork and Kerry waiting longer than a year for a CAMHS appointment. That is more than there are in some of the other CHOs on their own. It is a scandal.

I am not sure that everyone necessarily understands. I know the people in the Gallery will understand how difficult it is to even get into CAMHS because there is such an impulse to try to push people back into primary care. There are people I have encountered who have primary age children who are self-harming, and they have been told they are not severe enough for CAMHS. That is how severe people have to be to even get into CAMHS. One of the problems the Mental Health Commission should be addressing is the criteria and CAMHS not accepting things it would have accepted in the past. To even get into it at the minute is very difficult and people in some of those cases are waiting longer than 12 months. That issue needs to be addressed. There are people who cannot even get into CAMHS because while they are too severe for primary care, they are not considered severe enough for CAMHS. It is a huge issue that needs to be addressed.

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