Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State and I have been here before and I have already congratulated her. There is an urgent need for the mental health Bill to be enacted. It was an absolute damming indictment of the last Government that it failed. I have praised the Minister of State for her work and I fully supported her with that Bill, but it fell. That Bill was the culmination of years of consultation and recognition that the system had utterly failed in respect of mental health.

We go forward from the eighties and Planning for the Future. Then we go forward to A Vision for Change and then Sharing the Vision. What did not change was the system on the ground, which is the revolving door we see in Galway and in other institutions in the context of suicide, and then the failure to provide beds for people with eating disorders.

On a general level, the mental health Bill was to take us onto a new level with a human rights-based approach in recognition of our international obligations in respect of how we treat people with what are now being referred to as psychosocial disorders, moving away from involuntary detentions, which are at an all-time high, how we treat young people aged between 17 and 18, and regarding an increased monitoring role for the Mental Health Commission to take in community care facilities and so on.

I notice there is going to be a second implementation plan. As the previous speaker for the Labour Party or the Social Democrats pointed out, the first one has failed to reach its targets. I will be closely monitoring the enactment of the Bill and then the implementation plan meaning something.

See this speech in context