Sorca Clarke (Longford-Westmeath, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Statements and conversations on mental health are always welcome, no matter where they take place. However, we must be very clear and cut through the soundbites coming from Government not only since the election, but since 2020. There are many words that the parents of children who are not only not on a CAMHS waiting list, but who cannot even get in the door of CAMHS to be put on a waiting list, would use to describe this Government and previous Governments. This can be compared to Sinn Féin's commitment. Our position is very clear; regardless of where you live, if you have a mental health crisis, you will receive the right care. Our fully costed mental health action plan would transform services and give hope to those who need it by funding measures to two and a half the times the degree the previous Government did over the previous five years.

We propose universal counselling and integrated mental and well-being services; a new child and youth mental health service to replace CAMHS and provide integrated early intervention services; additional community CAMHS teams, CAMHS-ID teams, inpatient beds and early intervention in psychosis teams; multiannual funding certainty for the clinical programmes for eating disorders, ADHD in adults and self-harm and suicide reduction; 20 additional eating disorder inpatient beds and community-based services; the full emergency department roll-out of self-harm and suicide reduction programmes and embedding them across primary care and everyday clinical practice; an action plan to combat loneliness and isolation; the reopening of Keltoi, the residential dual-diagnosis facility; consultant liaison psychiatrists and suicide crisis assessment nurses in every emergency department and primary care centre; and importantly the development of an all-island mother and baby perinatal mental health unit.

In the lifetime of the last Government, there was an increase of 81% in the number of children waiting for a first-time appointment with CAMHS. There are 795 children waiting for a CAMHS appointment in CHO 8 area alone. There was an increase of 145% in the number of children waiting for longer than a year over the Minister of State's last term. In 2020, 9,689 children were on waiting lists for psychology. By 2024, that had grown to 18,368. On that same CAMHS, both the Maskey report and the Mental Health Commission reported children being misdiagnosed, mistreated and lost in the system.

While the Government is putting €9 million aside for mobile phone pouches, the Minister of State's speech references the €2.9 million in additional funding for CAMHS. Legislation to regulate CAMHS brought forward by my colleagues in Sinn Féin was kicked down the road by the Government, which then failed to deliver on its aims. The Bill to reform the Mental Health Act 2001 was put on the long finger and only introduced more than two years after pre-legislative scrutiny had been completed. The new programme for Government has less detail on mental health than the one presented five years ago.

The Government's legacy is one of heartbreak and of children being denied every opportunity to reach their full potential. A constituent of mine, following discharge from the adolescent mental health service at 18, was told that the adult service simply could not offer the services she needed. Overnight, her needs no longer existed, according to the assessment of her referral. The Minister of State is right that we are losing far too many people to suicide but that is the result of an understaffed, under-resourced and underfunded system.

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