Child and Youth Mental Health: Statements Dail Éireann — 2024-02-29 ============================================================ Pat Buckley (SF), Cork East I thank the Minister of State for being here. In fairness, it is not easy. I listened to most speakers today and to the Minister of State's opening statement, and it is true. People still hear it said that it is impossible to commit suicide in Ireland. It is actually impossible; a person cannot commit suicide in Ireland, since it was decriminalised in 1993. I want to put on the record that I always said I would work with the Minister of State. We have worked on other various projects. I attended the launch of the Minister of State's pilot project in Cork. It is my opinion that we missed a massive opportunity last night because by regulating any service, we make somebody accountable and responsible for their mistakes. I will go back to when we had the Sub-Committee on Mental Health in the previous Dáil. I will tell the Minister of State how bad it is. It is not the people or the front-line workers. It is the issue with top management. I remember speaking to a child psychologist who was appearing as a witness before the committee. The first question I asked him was about whether he was threatened by senior management for coming to the committee meeting on that day. His response was "Yes". That is a shocking indictment of how something is going to be run. This man was a child psychologist. The Minister of State can go back and check the record on that. A very interesting article on thejournal.ie by Órla Ryan, entitled "Falling Through the Cracks", actually shows how dysfunctional the system is that we have at the moment. However, it also points out how we can improve it. It is not always about money; it is about people taking responsibility and using a multidisciplinary approach. I was part of a delegation from the Joint Committee on Autism that visited Scotland which is working on a strategy similar to the no wrong door approach. It is delivering improvements. Until some years ago, dual-diagnosis was not even mentioned. As previous speakers said, people here just run away from it because they do not have the capability to take responsibility and make choices. Where a fellow is totally drunk and has suicidal ideation, the norm is to tell him to sober up and send him home instead of addressing both issues and concerns. We have to treat the person and not the problem. Every individual is different. I will give another example to show how bad the position was. In July 2018, I, a number of other Sinn Féin TDs and one Sinn Féin Senator, along with the chair of the Psychiatric Nurses Association of Ireland, visited Linn Dara CAMHS. We spoke very frankly, and I am frank when I decide to be frank. Within less than 15 minutes, we were standing outside in the car park like rabbits being blinded by the headlights of a car. That was the reaction we got when we told the hard truths about parliamentary questions. I do not envy the Minister of State. She has a struggle on her hands. I will always give credit where it is due, and we have been moving in the right direction in the past seven years. At one time, prior to the deaths of my brothers, if you mentioned the word suicide, people thought it was contagious. People are now more open and advanced about it and we hear people's stories. Somebody has to get the senior players in management to work with the staff below them. If they cannot look after a person, they should ask where the next best place is. They should not make excuses to move that person but put him or her in the proper pathway of care. The Sub-committee on Mental Health was a powerful, non-political committee that got responses and replies. It is a big loss to this Dáil. It showed up failings without pointing the finger at any individual. It said the system was broken and had to be fixed. I am happy I had the opportunity to speak in this debate. I know the Minister of State is trying her best but we lost an opportunity last night to regulate these services. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2024-02-29/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:44+00:00 Sitting date: 2024-02-29