Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We are not allowed use the word "lies" in here, so instead we will have to say the Government is systematically misleading people about why we have a recruitment and retention crisis in our health services in general and, specifically, in our mental health services. It fails to acknowledge the reason we cannot recruit or are not recruiting the staff we need - psychologists, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, occupational therapists and speech and language therapists - is because of the pay and numbers strategy restricting the ability of different health areas to recruit people.

I have a letter from the Psychiatric Nurses Association of Ireland, PNA, which came to me yesterday. It points out there are 700 too few psychiatric nurses in the country because of the pay and numbers strategy. A personal anecdote sums it up for me more generally. I know a young woman who has a Master's degree in psychology. She had to go to the Netherlands to do that course because it is too expensive to study psychology here. Where is she now? She is working in the psychology department of an international school in Thailand where they have a department full of psychologists and young graduates from this country. She likes Thailand but she would also like to be working here. However, you have to do a PhD here and she will not be able to afford to live here. This is the problem. The Government is not recruiting people because of pay and numbers. We have massively understaffed resources. We should have psychologists, and indeed psychology departments, in every school but we do not have them because the Government will not recruit them and it is too expensive for them to live here anyway.

One of the most stressful things I have ever come across - it happens fairly regularly in my clinic - is people coming in with mental health crisis situations and threatening to take their own lives. I am not qualified to deal with that and neither are my staff. When there was a briefing in the Oireachtas a while ago, and we asked what we should do about this, we were told to call the Garda. We were told to call the Garda because we do not have 24-hour emergency services we ought to have to respond to those sort of situations.

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