Maire Devine (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. As the Minister of State knows, Jigsaw began a national review of its national youth mental health services. The review aimed to report on finance, clinical and governance matters. It is welcome and there is certainly merit in stopping to take stock and examining if things can be done better but there has been a serious problem in the delay of the completion of this report.

To put it into context, my colleague, Deputy Brady, has been in contact with groups in Bray, County Wicklow, which have been working hard to secure a Jigsaw site for many years.Jigsaw has a development procedure and the community has undertaken to ensure it is ready, and indeed it is. Bray has done Trojan work on this. Young people have done the majority of the work. Jigsaw has deemed Bray ready for the service for well over a year now. Action was taken to begin this service in 2012, more than six years ago. In 2017, the HSE advised through parliamentary questions that the 2018 mental health budget would not have any funds for the expansion of Jigsaw services. As Members can imagine, this is disappointing for young people and adults in the communities that have been working tirelessly for the service and have been promised its delivery time and again.

I acknowledge that things take time. However, the review of Jigsaw services was supposed to be published in June. This would allow plenty of time for the findings to influence budget 2019. Recently, it was revealed through a parliamentary question I submitted that the deadline was pushed to September. It now seems the report will not be available until the end of the year. Is the delay in the publication of the review's findings going to be used as a justification for excluding expansion of funding for the mental health budget in 2019? Is Jigsaw still marketing itself as a service that wants to be in every county and does the HSE support this? It is absolutely vital that the Minister of State outlines in her response the reasons for the delay in the publication of the report and her Department's detailed plan for the expansion of Jigsaw services to other areas. We need to inform this House, the adults who have worked for years on this, and most importantly the young people who have committed to developing Bray for this service since 2012 and who so desperately need it.