Niall Ó Brolcháin (Green Party)

I am delighted the Acting Chairman is being generous with time to enable Senators express their angst, thus ensuring their mental health is catered for in the House.

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Moloney, who receives much praise, and rightly so, in this Chamber. The issue of mental health is important to the Seanad. It is an issue which thankfully all parties are agreed on. A Vision for Change is an important roadmap for the current and future Governments. We all need to get behind it and ensure it is delivered. A Vision for Change is equivalent to the Education for Persons with Special Education Needs, EPSEN, Act. There are in existence a number of important documents that will stand the test of time, one of which is A Vision for Change.

We are facing into a very tough budget and there is much lobbying taking place in regard to mental health services. The Green Party's policy is a rights based approach to mental health care. However, an issue arises in terms of available resources. The Minister of State, Deputy Moloney, cannot implement A Vision for Change to the extent that he would like if he does not have the funding to do so. Currently, less than 7% of the overall health budget is allocated to mental health. Green Party policy is that this needs to be increased to 12%. I support the Minister of State in his ongoing discussions in relation to the budget in terms of ensuring the amount of money being cut or retained in the mental health area is not affected to the same extent as many other areas. We need to increase in this and every subsequent budget the proportion of money being spent on mental health to the extent that we eventually increase it to 12% of overall spending on health.

From a parochial point of view, I commend the Minister of State on the good news he announced today in relation to the opening of a new 20-bed unit in Merlin Park Hospital, which will replace the current psychiatric unit for child and adolescent services. It is important that even in times of recession we continue to open new facilities. The Minister of State also announced the opening of a similar service in Cork, which is good news. A Vision for Change deals with issues such as community and primary care. A pilot project called Jigsaw in Galway, which has been extremely successful, must be continued. We often put in place pilot projects which are enormously successful but when the funding runs out they are discontinued, with the loss of experience gained. I would not like this to happen to Jigsaw.

A Vision for Change has been championed by the Minister of State, Deputy Moloney. However, there will be enormous changes in our health structure in the coming years. In this regard, we need to ensure in relation to any changes in the HSE that we focus on the key issue of primary care and of supporting communities, in particular in times of recession. We must support communities in providing good services to their people. There are many ways that this can be done that do not involve Government intervention. Most mental health care is provided by families, communities, including neighbours and so on. There is much we can do. Remaining positive is not easy in recessionary times. When speaking earlier to my wife she mentioned a number of positive measures in this regard, including listening to Lyric FM rather than some of the other channels, eating and sleeping well, which is often difficult to do when one is worried about all the appalling figures being thrown about by the Opposition, the media and often the Government.