Patricia Ryan (Kildare South, Sinn Fein)
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597. To ask the Minister for Health the number of persons who died by suicide by county, in 2021 and 2022, in tabular form; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [3974/23]

Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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In Ireland, national suicide statistics are provided by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) through their Vital Statistics publications which provide statistics on births, deaths and marriages.

Legally, in Ireland, a death can be registered up to three months after the date of occurrence.  In addition, all unnatural deaths, including deaths from intentional self-harm must be referred to the Coroner's Office. Deaths assigned an underlying cause of death of ‘External causes of injury and poisoning (including deaths from intentional self-harm and suicide)’, are therefore likely to be underrepresented in data for 2021 and 2022 as such deaths are reported to the Coroner’s Office for further investigation. This can then result in such deaths being registered late and they may not yet have been reported to the CSO.

In addition, public hearings in the Coroner's Court were limited as a consequence of the restrictions imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and this may also have resulted in deaths being registered late. In May 2021 the HSE also suffered a major cyber-attack which meant the General Register Office (GRO) was unable to register deaths, births or marriages for a number of weeks during 2021.

Data on deaths registered in 2021 and 2022 is currently provisional.  The most recent final data on deaths by cause of death is for 2020 (published in the Vital Statistics Annual Report 2020, October 2022).  Final data on deaths by cause of death for 2021 will be published by the CSO in October 2023 and for 2022 in October 2024.

In the case of suicides, following publication of final data on deaths by cause of death in the Vital Statistics Annual Report, the CSO subsequently publish data on Late Registrations for suicides and a ‘revised’ total number of suicides for each year.  Data on Late Registrations is currently available for suicides registered up to 2020.

Based on the official Vital Statistics publications of the CSO the total number of deaths assigned an underlying cause of death of ‘suicide and intentional self-harm’ in 2021 was 399. This data is provisional.  Data on suicide by area of residence has been published by the CSO for 2021. Data by area of residence is not yet available for 2022. Table 1 below shows the number of deaths by suicide and intentional self-harm published by the CSO by area of residence for 2021.  This data is provisional and as noted above is likely to be an underestimate. 

Table 1: Number of deaths (provisional) with an underlying cause of death of suicide or intentional self-harm by area of residence, 2021

Source: CSO, Vital Statistics, data.cso.ie/product/VSDO Table VSD30

Note: All unnatural deaths, which includes deaths from intentional self-harm must be referred to the Coroner's Office. This can result in the registration of these types of deaths being delayed and the number of deaths by suicide in 2021 will be an underestimate. 

To date, data for Quarter 1 and Quarter 2 of 2022 has been published. A total of 191 deaths were registered with a cause of death of ‘suicide and intentional self-harm’ in the first two quarters of 2022. Data by area of residence is not yet available.