Chris Andrews (Sinn Fein)

I thank the Minister of State for coming in. I appreciate that she took the time.

Your day really is not all that different. You leave the house and go to work. It is the same as it is every day. Maybe you go for a drink with colleagues or to a match afterwards, then you come home and it is so empty. The house is so unbearably empty. A piece of your life is gone forever in one tragic event. This is a story many of us know. Almost everyone has had the experience of this tragedy in life, if not with their partner, then within their family, among friends or through neighbours. This tragedy plays out every day in our country, again and again. I am talking about suicide.

This Saturday morning, thousands of people will be waking up early in support of Darkness into Light, building awareness around suicide prevention and raising money for urgently needed mental health services. Every single day, a family have their lives changed forever by suicide. In 2023 alone, more than 300 people in this State died by suicide. While, thankfully, this has reduced from previous years, it is still far higher than we can allow it to be. It is an ever-present reality in our society and we cannot fail to treat it as anything other than an emergency. More than one in five deaths of men under 25 years of age is through suicide. That is more than any other cause of death in this age group. Three out of every four suicides in Ireland are men. This is not just a statistic but a sad reflection on something very wrong with our society. Suicide is a growing issue for women, with the percentage of female suicides increasing by nearly 10% in the past decade.

We urgently need better access to mental health services both in Dublin and throughout the country. That will not happen without significant funding from Government. We need to properly fund suicide prevention programmes. We need to fund 24-7 crisis helplines and to have a real plan to combat loneliness, isolation and other causes of suicide and self-harm. Pieta, probably the best-known suicide prevention charity in Ireland, receives the vast majority of its funding from private donations. Initiatives like Darkness into Light, the walk this Saturday, 10 May, are important events and make real progress in funding services and building awareness. However, this issue is simply too important to be left to private charities. The State is failing to provide services that are urgently required and we need swift and decisive action by the Government to fix this. We simply must act now. I strongly urge the Minister of State to do everything she can to address the epidemic before it gets any worse.