Mental Health Bill 2024: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-22
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Frances Black (IND), Industrial and Commercial Panel

I welcome the proposed ban on the use of electroconvulsive therapy on children. I commend the Minister of State for taking this important step to protect young people.
To fully uphold the principle of autonomy, this legislation should go further and clearly state that ECT may only be administered to adults with their informed and voluntary consent. This is an important safeguard. Many individuals with lived experience have described ECT as extremely traumatic, often accompanied by serious and lasting side effects such as memory loss, cognitive impairment and chronic pain. One of the speakers who participated in a recent briefing held in the audiovisual room, Breda O'Toole, shared a particularly poignant account. After undergoing ECT, she lost the ability to remember music or play the piano, which was a devastating outcome for someone who had earned a university degree in music and worked professionally as a piano teacher. Sadly, her story is not unique. While I was a member of the sub-committee, I heard from individuals who lived in fear that ECT could be administered against their explicit wishes if they were later deemed to lack capacity. This fear is not unfounded, given the current legal ambiguity around consent and capacity in mental health treatment. Without a clear statutory requirement for informed consent, there is a real risk that people's expressed preferences could be overridden. Therefore, enshrining a legal requirement for informed consent to ECT would bring mental health law into closer alignment with the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act and Ireland's obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
My amendment is not a call for the complete elimination of ECT, but a call for ensuring that the use of ECT is governed by the highest standards of rights, dignity and consent, which I keep repeating. Respecting a person's autonomy must be the foundation of any therapeutic intervention, especially one as invasive and controversial as ECT.

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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