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

I will speak to amendments Nos. 123, 124 and 128.
Similar to amendment No. 122, amendment No. 123 is a technical amendment to insert a reference to the "registered proprietor" in section 49, to replace the current reference to the "responsible consultant psychiatrist", as the registered proprietor will be responsible for the making of an application to the court under this section.
Government amendment No. 124 provides for the application to the court under section 49 to be made by the registered proprietor "as soon as practicable" and prior to any treatment, outside of treatment under sections 48, 50 and 51.
It should be noted that at any time prior to the limit of 42 days the registered proprietor may submit an application to the Circuit Court. They do not have to wait up to day 42. There is no requirement that they wait until the 42-day window is nearly finished. They can make it at any stage during that time. At a service implementation and training level, I hope to see registered proprietors making these applications earlier in the 42-day window for people they expect to lack capacity in the medium-to-long term. It also takes pressure off consultant psychiatrists, who have enough to be doing every day looking after their patients rather than being bogged down in this type of legal paperwork.
I cannot support amendments Nos. 125 to 127, inclusive. Similar to the previous grouping, I believe requiring an application to be made to the Circuit Court within 72 hours would cause serious operational issues for the HSE and for the court. I mentioned discharge statistics in the debate on the previous grouping and all the points I made on that amendment stand equally for here. We cannot have a situation where close to 2,500 applications are made to Circuit Court annually when over half of those applications are expected to be withdrawn within a fortnight.
I meet a lot of clinicians. I visit a lot of approved centres. Last Friday afternoon, for example, I was speaking at an event in University Hospital Waterford and I actually met with a lot of the psychiatrists. I know quite a lot of them at this stage. I have never yet come across a consultant psychiatrist or the multidisciplinary team that works with them who want to involuntarily detain anybody for an hour longer than they should be.
We have to change the mindset about this. An approved centre is not a prison. An approved centre or department of psychiatry is a place where people who are mentally unwell or have a mental disorder go when they need treatment and support, where recovery is possible. We have to balance this. We often speak about human rights but we have to balance it and we cannot lose sight of the fact that people who go into an approved centre or department of psychiatry go there for a reason, namely, to get the support and help they need to deal with their mental disorder, to get better, and to get back to their communities.

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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