Mental Health Bill 2024: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-28
============================================================

Mary Butler (FF), Waterford

It is quite a while since we discussed this part of the Bill. When this Bill is passed and enacted, gardaí will no longer be involved in involuntary detentions. They will be completely off the pitch. This is what the Garda wants and what we want to achieve. We will have authorised officers instead. At present, there are approximately 117 authorised officers trained. The majority of them work in mental health. They might be social workers or mental health nurses. Before we can enact the relevant part of the Bill, we would have to have around 400 or 500. We may also need full-time authorised officers in big city regions, though not so much in rural areas. Therefore, there is a substantial amount of work involved.
As soon as my team gets the Bill through the Dáil and Seanad, with the support of Members, it will consider how to enact the Bill and secondary legislation. It will be phased in, in many ways. We will have to ensure, and I will have to be confident, that we have enough authorised officers. We know we have gardaí all over the country. Thirty-three percent of all involuntary detentions last year were proposed by the Garda, for example. We have to be in a position to deal with this.
I was sorry to hear about the situation the Senator spoke about. Seeing a garda now might have a triggering effect on the individual concerned. What happened has taken over a huge part of his life. Having authorised officers qualified in the area of mental health is important, notwithstanding the good work done by gardaí in the difficult situations in which they find themselves.
We need to see more of what we are doing in Limerick in relation to community access support teams, CAST, a pilot project on which I have worked closely with the Garda, HSE and regional executive officer Sandra Broderick. Where an issue arises with mental health – this is more for adults – and gardaí deem it safe, a clinical nurse specialist, or other clinician, in mental health attends.
The results are absolutely a game changer. They are phenomenal. We often roll out pilot programmes and we look at them and think about what we need to do. The Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan, is very taken with it as well and we want to mainstream it. It will take time, there is no doubt about it. However, at times when a lot of people come to the attention of the justice system and the Garda, it is care they need as opposed to a prison cell. This is what we want to see achieved.
As Chief Whip, I am in charge of all legislation going through the Houses at the moment and I had a legislation meeting today. We looked at when we pass this phase in the House and then pass the enactment phase, the fact is that we will come to a stage - believe it, or not - when the Mental Health Act 2001 will cease at midnight one night and the Mental Health Bill 2024 will come into law. Those who are involuntarily detained on the following day will all have to be reassessed because the terms of the 2024 Bill are more human rights focused. The person who is involuntarily detained and those who are there voluntarily will have more rights. That is where we are trying to focus our minds at the moment because that is a huge body of work as well. It is like the time we moved all the residents from the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum, which was under my watch at the time, all the way out to the forensic hospital in Portrane.
The whole purpose of these amendments and all the ones we have discussed here are as a result of consulting with and requests from the Department of children. I met with the ombudsman before Christmas. We had a long chat and he discussed the main concerns he had. He is very strong on minors being treated in adult facilities. We had quite a good meeting and he raised any real concerns he had but I cannot for say for definite whether he was involved in that particular amendment. We can check it out.

---

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/2026-01-28/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:33+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-28