Déirdre de Búrca (Green Party)

I welcome the Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children, Deputy Devins, to the House and thank him for his presentation. I also welcome the opportunity to discuss the important issue of suicide and the adequacy of the Government's current strategy on suicide prevention.

Senator Doherty used the word "emergency" in the context of suicide. It is increasingly clear that suicide is an urgent public health issue and a serious problem. Senator Corrigan mentioned the true statistics for those who die by suicide here each year, somewhere between 400 and 500. The research I have looked at suggests the figure for recognised suicides is close to 500. It is a grim statistic that this number of people choose to end their lives through suicide. Ireland has the fifth highest youth suicide rate in the European Union. Suicide accounted for 22% of all deaths in the ten to 17 years age group in 2004. The phenomenon of this increasing level of suicide has a marked impact on our young people.

There are marked gender differences in the levels of suicide. Men under 35 years of age make up 40% of all suicide deaths, which is a fact we cannot ignore when trying to make an adequate response to the issue. Some 11,000 cases of deliberate self-harm are seen in hospitals every year, 21% of which are repeat acts. However, many of those presenting in these cases do not receive any form of psychiatric assessment or aftercare. This is something to which we must attend. We must not allow them leave hospital to rejoin the community without some form of aftercare. Half of the 800 drownings that occurred in the Republic of Ireland between 2000 and 2005 were attributed to suicide. We can only guess at the number of suicide attempts involved in single vehicle crashes that result in death or injury. The statistics are grim and compelling and we need to take the issue seriously.

In examining the impact of suicide on society we must not just look at the individual impact. When an individual chooses to take his or her life through suicide, the immediate impact is on the family and the extended family. Having been a member of the Bray Suicide Support Group, I am very aware of the recovery process for families who are left grieving and in denial about the fact that one of their family members may have chosen to end his or her life. It is a long and tortuous process requiring high levels of support, the right information and advice at the right times and the integration of other services. The Coroner Service was mentioned earlier, as was the long period many families bereaved by suicide must wait until the inquest when all of the issues surrounding the death of the family member through suicide are raised and gone through in a forensic way. That is very difficult for the family members. We must try to design those services in such a way as to minimise the negative impact.

As well as the families we must mention the peers. We have talked about young people. We can only imagine the impact on the network of peers of any young person who chooses to end his or her life through suicide. Young people engage in copycat suicides, and the phenomenon has been recognised. When one member of a gang or a group of young people decides to end his or her life through suicide, it has a powerful effect on that individual's peers, and we can expect to see more of that in coming years. Unless we can design the right kind of prevention strategies, young people will emulate each other's behaviour and go on to attempt suicide themselves.

We cannot ignore the fact that there is also a wide impact on the community. For every person who chooses to end his or her life through suicide it has a wider impact on all of us who register that death because, in a sense, it is a verdict on a wider society. If we find there is a growing trend towards young people, especially young men, choosing to end their lives through suicide, that is in some way a reflection on the society in which they live. We must examine the kind of society in which we live where there are dominant, consumerist, market-led values and where life, in a sense, is not valued in the same way as it used to be.

When we were much less a competitive society dominated by the issue of economic growth, we had more time for each other and for building community. Religion was stronger in society and we placed a much greater value on each individual human life. With the secularisation of society, there is not a sufficiently robust value system to help and comfort young people who sometimes struggle with serious existential issues. As a community and society, we must examine how we can change that and promote a different value system to allow us to help young people to recognise that even when they are going through psychological difficulties and experiencing extreme psychological distress, their lives have a value and that it is worth seeking help.

There are problems in the system. As we discuss the strategy — it is positive that we have a national suicide prevention strategy, the National Office for Suicide Prevention and a comprehensive programme — we must recognise that we must put more funding into our mental health services. It has halved in the past 15 years. We must at least double the amount we are spending on our mental health services. I hope that by having this debate and recognising suicide as a priority for attention, it will encourage all of us in government and in opposition to support the increase in the mental health budget.