Eugene Murphy (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Senator Flynn is doing very well, just as well as any of us. It is no harm saying that.

It is great to be a part of this debate. I have great faith in Deputy Butler as a Minister of State. I do not think we could have a more hard-working Minister with responsibility for mental health. Apart from her everyday duties as part of a Government, she travels up and down the country to engage with people: the people who run the services, people who use them and people who want to use them. I wish to remember all the people who, day after day, sometimes at weekends, make sure that so many people get the services, whether paid for through the HSE or voluntary. I think we all know that in many respects those who provide the services take a lot of abuse. That is never referred to.

I recently dealt with a very unusual situation involving mental health. Parents contacted me about their daughter, who was being made a skit of because she was practising religion. She is a Catholic. That does not matter. It could have been any religion. This girl had got into an extremely agitated state, full of anxiety and heading for mental health difficulties because some of her female friends were telling her she had a screw loose to be practising religion. Such situations needs to be taken into account as well.

There are many areas in society that we do not look at when it comes to mental health. We had Frances Haugen in the Houses yesterday to discuss social media. She is a very impressive lady. I did not get a chance to go down to the committee meeting but I have spoken about her. To me, Frances Haugen is a hero. She had a very lucrative job in a major company. I am sure that, financially and otherwise, she has lost a lot. It should be remembered that she is coming from the inside looking out. We talk a lot about social media but we never really seem to say they are having an extraordinary effect on mental health. I know families living in fear, not knowing how to handle children of 12, 13 or 14 being influenced by all sorts of unsavoury issues on social media. How do you handle that? Do you take their phones away? How do you talk to them? These people, families up and down this country and in other countries, are utterly frozen by social media. Therefore, when we talk about mental health, I want to hear people talk about social media and speak straight out about the damage social media have done. We all talk about the good sides of social media and we all use them, but we all have to realise there is a very significant downside to them. Until we all start speaking about the damage and the downside of social media in mental health debates, we will not be able to look after our people satisfactorily.

There are huge financial commitments. I am not going to turn this into a political debate. The figure allocated to mental health in 2022, €1.49 billion, is huge. We have issues with staffing. There is no doubt about that. In many respects we cannot get the staff. I do not know if this will be of any assistance to the Minister of State, but I believe we should target Irish people in health services abroad and go out of our way to entice them back to fill some of those positions. Some of them would say that when they apply for jobs they do not get satisfactory answers. Some of them, particularly in the NHS in England, are very experienced people who would come back to their roots here and work within the system. Maybe we should target them.

Those are all issues we need to deal with. We need to begin to fill those vacancies. In an awful lot of cases, however, the shortcomings in staff numbers are not down to money issues or to the Government.

As for CAMHS, I wish to speak about the e-mental health hub in Castlerea, which was announced in 2020 by the current Tánaiste. It is unique and the first of its kind in Ireland. I think two more will be set up now because of the Minister of State's good work. The one in Castlerea is on the site of the old Rosalie centre. We have discussed that centre many times in the past. It was a centre for people with mild mental health issues.It was their home and when it was to be closed down, a process that started in 2015 and 2016, there was a big ruaille buaille but it closed and people were transferred to other places. We got an e-mental health hub in Castlerea. It is developing but as with everywhere else, the story is that some staff positions cannot be filled. When politicians speak about mental health, I ask that they speak about the facts. I make that point specifically about Castlerea. I will finish on this point as quickly as I can. It is not true to say that the e-mental health centre in Castlerea is not operating, there are no staff in it and all we can see inside is a big television screen.