Marc MacSharry (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the announcement today from Aviva that an additional 200 jobs are to be created in Galway and that fewer jobs will be cut than the numbers announced before Christmas. In early autumn Senator Darragh O'Brien was aware that there were some issues in Aviva. He raised that issue many times and called on the Department, as I did, to engage directly with Aviva and all major employers in Ireland to ascertain if there were any issues that could be worked through to ensure we limited any potential need to scale down the numbers of jobs. If that was done we can see the benefits now. There was not a need for the scare-mongering that took place about some 950 jobs and the fear generated in families throughout the country about the loss of those jobs. Notwithstanding that there will be job cuts, I welcome that those cuts will be minimised and the creation of additional jobs in Galway. I ask the Deputy Leader that the Government would engage with all major employers on an annual basis through IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland and that all possible actions are taken to ensure that at least the current employment levels are not only maintained but expanded upon.

I ask for a debate as early as possible with the Minister for Health, Deputy Reilly, on the issue of mental health funding. I appreciate that the Minister of State, Deputy Lynch, has line responsibility in this area but I am concerned about the amount of the health budget being allocated to her. In the mid-1980s, spending on mental health constituted 13% of the overall budget and it has consistently dropped since then to just 4.5%. This week a number of the nursing organisations will hold their annual conferences, and psychiatric nurses are calling for an increase in this spend. A total of 9% of the total health care workforce is in the mental health area but 20%, or 1,500, people in that workforce were lost through the moratorium.

The silent crisis facing this country is suicide, which is touching many families in every corner of Ireland. We must be prepared to highlight that crisis which effectively is wiping out the equivalent of the population of a small village on an annual basis. If it was happening in Syria we would be sending in the United Nations. If it was happening in Northern Ireland we would be calling for the UN to come here and take action against us. Last year less than €9 million was allocated for the prevention of suicide. That is a piecemeal approach to what is a silent crisis and one about which we cannot do enough in the context of raising awareness of it. We agree to the Order of Business but I ask that mental health funding be debated here, with the senior Minister present, within the next few weeks. I reserve the right to call votes on that issue if it is not raised by the Deputy Leader.

I commend the young people of Davis College, Summerhill, Mallow, on winning the Young Social Innovators award yesterday, which was presented by the President. These projects deal with homelessness, mental health, poverty and so on but I particularly liked their winning project which was on raising awareness of missing people, and their campaign for a national day for missing people. I ask the Deputy Leader to encourage those of us in this House to support that campaign because many people are cynical about that in the sense that when one is gone, one is gone.