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Seanad
‹ An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business

Mental health and CAMHS funding

Summary

Senator McFadden raises underfunding of CAMHS, disability services and local mental health facilities in CHO 8, while Senator McDowell warns that long psychiatric waits breach statutory duties and endanger lives.

I want to raise the issue of mental health facilities, the child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, and disability services in my local community health organisation area, CHO 8. I have said on numerous occasions that I believe CHO 8 has the least funding per capita for disability services and for CAMHS. I am concerned that every time there is a difficulty with the budget, disability services are like low-hanging fruit and lose out each time. I would like the Minister of State with responsibility for mental health to come in here to discuss this. Part of this discussion could be about the assistant psychologist posts advertised in the past two years, 120 the year before last and again last year, the big recruitment drive, the week-long interview sessions in hotels. Hundreds of young people were interviewed and I do not know if any of those positions have been filled. If they were filled, by their nature, young people move and I do not think they were backfilled. There is a huge flaw in a system that can announce 120 positions for assistant psychologists but not fill all of them or fill some at least. I do not know what they are doing with them.

Assistant psychologists are perfectly capable of carrying out assessments under the supervision of a senior psychologist, and reducing waiting lists, and that is what should be done. I ask that the Minister of State come before the House to have this debate with us and give us his impression of what is going on and how we can make it better.

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I support what Senator Freeman said about psychiatric services. If, as she stated, an emergency appointment for a psychiatric interview is taking 13 weeks, we are not just talking about delays but also about lives. The HSE is statute-bound to provide psychiatric services, and there comes a point at which it is in breach of its statutory duty. I think this will end up in the courts in the form of some massive action at some stage. The problem is that when people, especially young people, take their own lives, there is no financial penalty on the people responsible. It is very serious. Children could be denied psychiatric help for 13 weeks when they are in crisis.

The other matter I wish to speak about is the desirability of asking the Minister of State with responsibility for the Electricity Supply Board, in which I think the State is still a shareholder, to come before the House to explain the reason for the following: when, in the 1960s, the board had destroyed the longest single stretch of Georgian architecture in Dublin by putting up a hideous office block on Fitzwilliam Street, it then had the opportunity to rectify the damage it had done. Deputy Jim O'Callaghan, when he was a member of Dublin City Council, had inserted into the city development plan a requirement that any development on that site should involve the reinstatement of the facade. The board campaigned to change this in order that it could put up another incongruous building on the site. Now it appears that the board is not even building this building for itself; it is a speculative office development that it is offering to the market to dispose of. There is no excuse for this. The opportunity to restore this part of Georgian Dublin was sitting there, and the ESB, in its wisdom, has chosen to ignore that opportunity, to get Dublin City Council to change its development plan to allow it not to restore the damage it did. Now the board is proposing to sell off the development, once it has it finished, for private office development. This is a terrible tragedy, and somebody - the shareholder - should take responsibility for what has happened.

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