Shane Cassells (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, for coming to the House to address this critical issue, namely, the need to reinstate a director of mental health services. I know the Department of Health has competing demands from cancer care to cardio to treatments across the board, but the need for us to grasp in a definitive way the issue of mental health is one I see as a pressing emergency in this country. Nobody knows that more than the Minister of State because, since her appointment, she has been a champion of kicking down doors, changing attitudes and creating new ways of doing business. There is a commitment in the programme for Government to reinstate this role, which existed from 2013 to 2017 and was then merged into another aspect.

Why do we need a director of mental health services in this country? We have a new mental health strategy in Sharing the Vision but there is no point in the Minister of State doing so much good work in crafting new policy unless there is someone there driving that strategy for her and making sure we are getting the results we need. One man I have spoken about here previously, who is a champion of positive mental health and who has used his national profile to campaign on the issue is Rory O'Connor, a fellow Meath man who runs Rory's Stories on Facebook and has a huge following not just in terms of his humorous take on Irish life but because he uses his profile to speak about mental health with a series of thought-provoking pieces. He has battled his own demons in the past and chronicled them in a top-selling book. I spoke to him before coming to this Chamber and he said, "Shane, a big storm is coming and we need to put up the umbrellas as best we can."

He told me how through his engagement with schoolchildren - he conducts talks in schools throughout Ireland every week - he can see in the faces of 17 and 18-year-olds how they have suffered immensely. It will take them years to come to terms with the impact on their mental health and development as young men and women from the isolation they experienced during lockdown and to deal with the fallout from that prolonged period of isolation away from normal life. He also spoke quite extensively about the impact on men in their 60s from his work with men's sheds. These are people who would not normally be well able to express their emotions and how they are feeling. He said he can see from that that there is a significant problem in that regard as well from going around and meeting men in these men's sheds. Those were his words to me: "Shane, a big storm is coming and we need to put up the umbrellas as best we can."

I am calling for the reinstatement of this role of director of mental health services.I know that the Minister of State has done a huge amount of work even in the last week. I know that she has introduced a new scheme and has allocated €1 million for 16,500 talk therapy sessions, which are free of charge for those who have been impacted by the isolation of Covid-19. That is the kind of work that the Minister of State has been doing and I praise her for that. However, as I said, the call here is to ensure that we reinstate the directive for mental services so that we drive that strategy that the Minister of State wants to see happen.