Fidelma Healy Eames (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister of State. This is a broad-ranging debate on the issue of suicide prevention and I thought I would confine my remarks to a few basic points based on some practice.

It is a difficult area. Despite so much being done in this area, we know we are still not managing to nip it in the bud. There are really, as yet, no definitive answers but I suppose what we do know is what we should not do. In the past few weeks, there has been an emotive debate on the issue of career guidance in the country given that the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Quinn, stated that the career guidance counsellor is a teacher like every other teacher and he or she will be within the teacher allocation. It has driven the career guidance organisation to an emotive level and some of its spokespersons, in particular, an eminent spokesperson who is sound in the area of career guidance, have made inflammatory comments on the issue of suicide. The spokesperson to whom I refer, who is a former president of the career guidance counsellor organisation, has stated that reducing career guidance provision will increase suicide among young people. There is no evidence of that. In fact, the contrary is the case. In the past 30 years, there have been significant increases in the number of career guidance counsellors but yet there has been a considerable increase in suicide.