Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for her question. I pay tribute to the work that our psychiatric nurses do right across this country. This Government, including myself and the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, is deadly serious about the expansion of mental health services. The budget in that regard has increased by several hundred million euro in the lifetime of this Government.

I will be the first to acknowledge that our front-line clinicians are experiencing pressures because of the pause on hiring. It is worth remembering that the pause only came in because the HSE, having been funded to hire a record 6,000 extra staff last year, in fact hired 8,000. We can see that reflected in the number of psychiatric nurses. I encourage the Psychiatric Nurses Association of Ireland to engage with the HSE, use the industrial mechanisms of the State and not to start with actions that would curtail services for patients but to instead engage with the relevant industrial relations mechanisms. In comparison with last October when the embargo was introduced, there are now 175 more psychiatric nurses in place. Even during the embargo, the psychiatric nursing workforce has increased.

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