John Gilroy (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief. I am a psychiatric nurse. I spent 27 years in the job and I have a fair insight into the challenges. I watched the programme last night and I am absolutely outraged. I share all the anger that has been expressed.

I heard it being described as a level of care. It is not care at all, but a level of abuse. The word "care" does not enter into it. I listened carefully to my colleagues who have first-hand experience from a service user's point of view and the level of concern, annoyance, anger and frustration in their voices must be taken on board by everybody. We cannot quantify what the difficulty is in our services but we have to think that the overwhelming majority of people working in them are decent, hard-working people. That point cannot be forgotten.

We must approach this in a cool way, despite the level of anger we justifiably feel. I was a little concerned to hear in the early comments from Pat Healy, Tony O'Brien and the Minister on the programme, and the Minister also mentioned it in her statement here, about initiating undercover investigations. There probably is a role for undercover investigations, but not as a first response. I caution against going down this road. As a health care professional one works as part of a team. The nurses, doctors, care assistants, art therapists, physiotherapists, occupational therapist and many other therapists are professionals and must work together as a team. If there is a feeling among the team that one person is there solely to find fault with everybody else, it will undermine the work of the team. That will be the unintended consequence of what we are trying to prevent. I caution against this as a first response.

I recommend that we set up a proper peer advocacy network. I have said this in the House several times. It should be underpinned by statute, be fully funded and provide 24-hour accessibility. This is what we must do. It is a difficult thing to do. It will be a hard job and expensive, but having watched the programme last night I doubt that any money would be poorly spent in this regard. Peer advocacy is the way to go.

Senator Mulcahy rightly spoke about governance. He might have been a little unfair to Des Kavanagh. I listened to the same interview but I did not have his interpretation of what was said. However, I accept the point he is making, which is that without character and temperament one cannot train people to be anything. This is first thing an interview is for, and I was shocked when somebody said earlier that many of the jobs in the HSE are filled without any interview. That is absolutely scandalous. If people do not have the required temperament and character, they have no place working in the caring professions.

This is a very difficult time for the Minister. People are struggling with the issue and demanding immediate answers. Unfortunately, it will take some time to put in place the proper structures to ensure that the most vulnerable people across the entire range of services are fully and properly protected.