Mental Health Bill 2024: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2025-12-09
============================================================

Mary Butler (FF), Waterford

My understanding after talking to consultants is that they would support a person to attend at an earlier stage in the tribunal's process if they felt the person was well enough to do that against, for example, leaving everybody to wait 20 or 21 days. There is one small difference as well, although I think it is a significant difference. Both Sharing the Vision and the Mental Health Bill support family involvement. The Bill states that any person admitted voluntary or involuntarily, adult or child, accessing inpatient services may name a family member or any other person as their nominated person.
That is not in the 2001 Act and it is really important. A nominated person can receive information of a general nature about the nominating person's condition, care and treatment, attend meetings along with the person, including meetings of the review board, and support the person in making decisions about care and treatment. The nominated person does not have the statutory right to make decisions on behalf of the person but he or she is there to support that person, help to advocate on behalf of the person and be informed of updates about the person's condition.
The Senator is right about a person who is involuntarily detained and does not have capacity or somebody who is involuntarily detained and may not, as she said, feel educated enough to articulate what he or she wants for his or her care. That is why I was very keen to include the provision in the Bill whereby, for the first time ever, people can nominate a person. Obviously, that comes back to the consent issue and people may decide not to nominate anyone. However, we are very hopeful that having a nominated person will be helpful. When people have a mental health difficulty or disorder, they always do much better, even in community services, with the support of a loved one or somebody else to be there with them at this really difficult time.
That statutory instrument will be written into the Bill. I would be happy to review it every year to examine the statistics on how far out are we on day 14, 15, 16 or whatever. Having family support for people is vital. For me, it is the game-changer we did not have previously.

---

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/seanad/2025-12-09/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:26+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-09