Mental Health Bill 2024: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-22
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Mary Butler (FF), Waterford

I thank the Senator. The purpose of any approved centre or any department of psychiatry or any inpatient supports is to provide treatment to people who have mental health illness or may have a mental health disorder and to support people to recover and to get them home as soon as possible. That is the only purpose of our approved centres. Thankfully, we have come a long way from institutionalised care and asylums that we had for so many years. Last year I travelled to the World Health Organization in Paris for a one-day event and I had several bilateral meetings. It was interesting to meet Dr. Jo Etienne Abela, the Minister for Health and Active Ageing, in Malta, who I know quite well. At the moment, Malta has only just begun moving people out of institutions for the very first time. He wanted to know from me how had we done this in Ireland and how had we supported people to live well in their own communities.
In 2025, working with the Department of housing, over 500 people with an enduring mental health condition were rehoused in Ireland to live in their communities and to have the wraparound supports they need. We have come a long way and it is really important to acknowledge this.
We do not set out definitions of consent to treatment in relation to voluntarily admitted people. In all such cases, consent to treatment is governed by the common-law understanding of consent in relation to both mental health and physical health. I would have some concerns that if we are going into a space of defining consent in relation to voluntarily admitted people, we may stray from the common-law understanding and this could result in unknown, unintended consequences. Notwithstanding that, the Senator is quite right that no one should be coercively treated as a voluntary patient. Consent to treatment for voluntary patients should be based on informed consent, as I have said, and if there are issues regarding consent for voluntary patients, the HSE's national consent policy must be enforced. That is extremely strong and all staff members must follow this consent policy. That is the importance of having our patient advocacy services in place if somebody wants to raise an issue in relation to their own particular treatment. I just wanted to put that on the record of the House and that is the thinking behind it. These are for voluntary people, We are treating mental health here the same as physical health and the common-law understanding of what consent is.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-01-22/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:32+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-22