Pádraig Rice (Cork South-Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I too congratulate the Minister of State on her reappointment as Minister of State with responsibility for mental health and also her appointment as Government Chief Whip.

I will talk about funding, policy and the law. On funding, for far too long mental health services have been the Cinderella of our health services. Decades of underinvestment have left us with understaffed and underresourced services. The system needs a major overhaul to shift the focus towards proactive and community-based services, but this kind of reform requires real investment. We simply cannot have another five years of stagnated budget allocations. By now the mental health budget should represent about 10% of the overall health budget. This was a target set under Sláintecare but Governments over the last number of years have failed to meet this commitment and the new programme for Government is silent on it. In the 2025 budget it represents 5.8% of the total, which is a mere 0.1% increase on 2024. Since 2020 the allocations have fluctuated between 5% and 6%. It is not good enough. Will the Minister reaffirm this Government’s commitment to reach 10%, as set out, and set a pathway to achieving that goal? This perpetual failure to reach the 10% target is not good enough in terms of funding.

The implementation of the national mental health policy, Sharing the Vision, is simply not happening quickly enough. I was looking at the report from the monitoring group from November 2024. The progress report for the national implementation and monitoring committee, the body responsible for driving and overseeing the implementation of Sharing the Vision, revealed just 50 of 100 targets are on track. This is a stark finding and cannot be ignored. It must be an impetus for change and we need to get these targets on track, get them implemented and get the policy delivered. The Minister of State will have our full support in trying to do that.

I agree with Deputy O’Meara who spoke earlier about the importance of SafeTALK and ASIST.

These are courses I did myself and I too have had to use those skills. They are vitally important. It is crucial we get those out to communities and train as many people as possible. There are particular concerns in respect of some of the minority communities, such as the Traveller and LGBT communities, which need a particular focus and a tailored response.

In the context of the law, while I welcome the fact that the mental health Bill has been restored to the Thirty-fourth Dáil, it should have gone through the legislative process long ago and be enacted by now. Looking at the timeline for this Bill, an expert group was appointed in 2012 to review the Act. It is now ten years since that expert group provided recommendations. It recommended 165 changes to the 2001 Act. It is a very long time from 2012 until now for that expert review. The then-Minister of State with responsibility for mental health and older people, Deputy McEntee, promised a first draft of the Bill by the end of 2016, but it took until 2021 for the heads of Bill to be published and another three years before it got to the House. It is not good enough.

Although the existing Act is at odds with international human rights law, it remains on the Statute Book. Time and again, the language of human rights has been used and embraced by governments but the policies and the laws required simply are not. The new mental health Bill represents a real opportunity to change that and to provide a person-centred, human rights-compliant approach to mental healthcare. This is why the Bill must be prioritised once committees are back in place. I look forward to working with the Minister of State to ensure the Bill is enacted as quickly as possible.

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