Mental Health Bill 2024: Committee Stage (Resumed) Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-22 ============================================================ Mary Butler (FF), Waterford Dr. Amir Niazi is the chief clinical officer for CAMHS. He is a very good friend of mine by now. I actually call him my right hand because he is always at the end of the phone for any support or advice that I need. He is a very wise man. He was before the Oireachtas committee yesterday speaking about the very tough situation for anyone who finds themselves with an eating disorder. Dr. Niazi spoke about bed capacity in relation to CAMHS. I get the figures for bed capacity every week without fail. We have 52 beds for CAMHS open at the moment in Cherry Orchard in Dublin, in Eist Linn in Cork, in Merlin Park in Galway and in Vincent's we have ten beds for 16- and 17-year-olds. Last year we ran at 70% capacity in relation to those beds, so there were beds available, but I cannot speak to the two individual cases where it was not appropriate to transfer a 17-year-old at that time. That is a decision I am not privy to and I respect that decision. There was a reason behind it. That is the point I will take. This is a clinician making a decision in real time, possibly at 1 or 2 in the morning. Both cases were supported by family. Both cases were voluntary; they were not involuntary. In both cases, a decision was taken that, for the safety of the young person, the best thing to do was admit them for a short period with the support of their parents in a room on their own, as the Senator said, with 24-hour nursing support. It is portrayed as though we were locking them into a room with 12 or 14 other very sick psychiatric patients. We were not. We are far from it. I have said it here before and I will say it again: if I live to be a hundred, I will not legislate for it. I will not change my mind. I feel so strongly about it because I know of an individual case and if that young man had not been admitted on a particular night the story would have been different. We all have lived experience. I will not tie the hands of a clinician behind their back if they want to save a young 16- or 17-year-old's life and they feel that admitting them into a room overnight in an adult facility is the best thing to save their life. I want to get to zero and I will continue to push and push. We had to close beds in Linn Dara in Cherry Orchard about three years ago for patient safety. I secured the funding in budget 2026 to reopen those beds. I also secured the funding to open phase 1 of the national children's hospital for ten beds. We will open in two phases there, ten beds and another ten beds. I visited there before Christmas. All we hear is negativity about the children's hospital and the length of time it has taken to open it. I get all that. I left the children's hospital after visiting the mental health wing, as I call it. It is too good to be called a unit; it is a wing. What I saw was absolutely spectacular. There are classrooms that will support the school in Linn Dara. Dr. Brendan Doody was with me that day. It cannot open soon enough. I know it is after costing €2.2 billion but my God, when we see the facilities when they will open. I have to pay tribute to the Minister, Deputy Carroll MacNeill, for the work she has done. A section of the hospital was handed over to the HSE in the past few weeks. Our foot is in the door and we cannot get there fast enough. We can talk about a lack of beds. Last year, as I said, we had capacity a lot of the time. We currently have 22 of those 52 beds which are specifically for eating disorders. There are situations that arise of which we are not privy to all the details. I would be of the view that we look to the life of the child first and then later we can worry about being reprimanded that they had to go into an adult unit for a day or two, if it meant their life was saved. I have said this in the Dáil and have been saying it since before I took up this post. I will not legislate for it. --- 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/2026-01-22/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:32+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-22