Mental Health Bill 2024: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2025-12-09
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Lynn Ruane (IND), University of Dublin

I welcome the Minister of State's comments and thank her for them. She triggered something in my mind regarding the CORU registration of members of the wider psychosocial care team. It probably will not always apply to psychologists, depending on their background. I am only remembering now, which I did not recall when I was writing my amendment, that in homeless services, for instance, there are people who are key workers, including community development workers and people working in various different ways across the country. There is a concern, when CORU registration happens, that some people who have returned to education, say, to become a key worker in a homeless service, due to a new standard or something in relation to vetting, may lose their jobs or positions because they might have a difficulty in the past whereby they have a conviction on their record. There is a fear around that vetting for CORU registration for people working in the homeless sector, just as an example. They also will not be able to progress because certain positions within certain sectors require vetting at the point of progressing to a different role.
There seems to be a little fear across some services that CORU registration will see people who have dedicated themselves to doing differently with their lives, but who have convictions on their record from the past, facing a real barrier and obstacle in keeping their position or progressing. In the case of the psychosocial care teams I talk about, a lot of people are working in various sectors who have had a very particular experience in their life and it is because of that experience they have dedicated themselves to training as healthcare or social care workers in order to change the conditions that affected them so much in their lives. Has that come up as a difficulty in regard to this Bill and the registration of psychologists by CORU? If it has not arisen with psychologists, it probably will arise in respect of the careers slightly below them in terms of educational attainment such that we may begin to see people with certain degrees being pushed out of jobs. It will affect mental health teams in the future that are considered to be under psychosocial care.

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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