Maire Devine (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will try to be less cranky. The Minister of State has got an expanded brief today. As the other Members are in absentia, I know the response will probably not be very satisfactory but I thank him for coming to the House.

By way of background, in 2012, an expert group was appointed to review the Mental Health Act 2001 by the then Minister of State, Kathleen Lynch, and in 2015, a total of 165 recommendations were made. That seems like an eon ago but nothing has happened since then.

As a former psychiatric nurse and union representative, I was very involved with the review of the Mental Health Act and the law in terms of those working on the ground also. We saw that there was a dire need for the Act to be overhauled. Its aim was to protect people who go into hospital to avail of mental health care and treatment.

To date, only two of the expert group’s recommendations have come into effect. The Government has failed to meet its own timetable. In June 2016, the then Minister of State with responsibility for mental health, Deputy Helen McEntee, publicly stated that this would be done by the end of that year. Since then, numerous dates have been given for publication of the draft legislation but nothing has happened. These delays are hugely problematic given the lengthy duration of the review of the Act to date and the seriousness of the gaps in human rights protections for adults and children receiving inpatient mental health treatment.

We are all in favour of moving away from antiquated, Victorian-like methods to modern day treatments where people can have a say and be included in their treatment. That provides people with ownership of their treatment and it is much more effective and beneficial for the patient in terms of their recovery.

We are still only at the infant stage of this process, which has been going on a long time. We are waiting for new legislation but a body of work can be done in the meantime. I had legislation ready but, unfortunately, it was rejected. It concerns 16- to 17-year olds consenting to treatment. An anomaly exists in respect of the human rights of those individuals. Teenagers of that age can consent to physical treatment and dental treatment but when it comes to treatment of the spirit or the mind, whatever one wants to call it, they are not allowed consent. It will only take one young person to take this issue to the High Court for this Government to move very quickly on it, as it did earlier last year following instructions of the High Court on detention for periods of more than six months in a psychiatric hospital.

I acknowledge Deputy Buckley in the Gallery. Yesterday, I moved First Stage of the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) (Amendment) Bill 2019, which goes a long way towards protecting the rights of involuntary patients.

I have been naive in the past but in the three and a half years I have been a Member of the Seanad, I have become much more clued in to the way politics works. When one sits down with the Minister or officials in the Department of Health, one comes away wanting to shut down the Department. Are they so mean that they cannot share democracy? They covet everything. Measures cannot be seen to come from the Opposition yet it is in the spirit of democracy and the human rights of involuntarily incarcerated people that we try to give voice to them. That is not being allowed to happen because work has not yet been done on this reform yet Opposition Members like myself and Deputy Pat Buckley are working away on it. The Bill was passed by the legislative department here. We have worked very hard on the Bill only for it to be shut down without an alternative being offered other than to say it will be dealt with later.