Sharon Keogan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I want to pay tribute to a Cavan woman, Leona Maguire, on winning the LPGA tournament this weekend. She is a great ambassador not only for Cavan but for young women in sport and young girls.

Last October the Leader promised me she would arrange a debate in the Seanad on mental health and young people. We talked last week and in previous weeks about the death of Eden Heaslip. This weekend I had the experience of the youngest death ever where I had to walk into and out of a house and that was of a 14-year-old child who died by suicide. We need to have a discussion on this issue and to put together some community crisis response teams and permanent councillors in schools. It has gone on too long.

We are not dealing with the issues on the ground. It is left to community leaders like ourselves to come up with solutions. We cannot do that. There is a ripple effect and everybody knows that effect. It was in Cavan last week. It had its fourth such death in the parish of Denn after Eden Heaslip. There was another death last week and now I know of another one in Duleek. I am afraid of my life of what that ripple effect will encounter for us in our town. We had five deaths by suicide in one year in 2017-18. It can devastate a community and it takes years to heal.

I want the Minister for Health to be invited to the House to deal with this issue and for us to come up with some suggestions on how we can set up a community crisis response team. There are no organisations doing that at this time. SOSAD, Pieta House, MyMind or Jigsaw do not do it. There is an opening for an NGO or a Government body to stand up and say it will do that, that it will go into a town and do a health check, and see what it can do to help and support that town. The National Educational Psychological Service and the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service have been calling for this for years.

I note the Green Party has welcomed the national retrofit plan. We have the warmer homes scheme. There is a 26-month delay in the delivery of measures under it and 7,000 homeowners are waiting to get works done under it. It is all very well announcing plans but we do not have the manpower or workers in the construction sector to do this work. We must address the deficits in that sector.