Mental Health Bill 2024: Committee Stage (Resumed) Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-29 ============================================================ Frances Black (IND), Industrial and Commercial Panel I thank the Minister of State very much. It is great. I really do appreciate her engagement. It does mean a lot. I want to speak to the amendment if that is okay because it is important to put on the record. While I covered a lot of the points already during my discussion on the other amendment on the need for an independent complaints mechanism, I want to re-emphasise how important I believe an independent complaints mechanism to be. As I often do, I want to return to the lived experience voice because those are the voices that should be heard. In actual fact, that is probably why I became a legislator. To hear and be able to represent those voices is very important, and they should be heard today in this Chamber as we look at the Bill. I will come back to the audiovisual room presentation on the Bill. Breda O'Toole spoke powerfully about the difference an independent complaints mechanism could have made for her. If the Minister of State does not mind, I will quote what she said: If an independent Complaints Mechanism had existed during the 23 years I spent under psychiatric care, I would not have lost the pivotal, most productive period of my life. Such a mechanism would have provided me with a way to voice my concerns—not only about the treatment I received, but also about the distressing mistreatment and abuse I witnessed among other patients Similarly, Nicola Clare, another of our experts by experience at the audiovisual room briefing, spoke about her experience of actually attempting to make a complaint about her care using the existing mechanisms. She described it as "exhausting, isolating, traumatising and impossibly hard". She said: I felt I didn’t stand a chance against an institution hell bent on protecting itself. I often wonder how different it might have been had I an advocate to support me or if an independent complaints procedure existed. I wonder how many more of me there are. Would an independent service start seeing patterns? Would it allow for open dialogue and possible changes? I don’t know, but it is certainly worth considering. These are comments from those who have had distressing lived experiences. Again, it is really important that I note them. I really want to highlight the many incredible mental health professionals and services we have in this country who do incredibly difficult and important work. I have to pay tribute to them all because it is very difficult. I also want to say that as in all walks of life, there will always be a few bad apples or people who are not as great. There is probably a majority who are brilliant but there are one or two who are not so good, and we have to highlight that. When we are dealing with people who have a huge amount of power and other people in very vulnerable circumstances, it is absolutely essential that there is a mechanism to weed out bad practices. That is really what we are trying to do here. That mechanism also protects all the wonderful staff who are doing their best because it means they do not get tarred with the same brush. It is also important that we consider that any one of our loved ones could be accessing mental health services tomorrow. There are so many people we all know. We all have somebody in our family; there is no doubt about it. We have to consider that it could be any one of our loved ones accessing mental health services tomorrow. Would we not want to have those safeguards in place for our complaints to be independently and appropriately investigated and dealt with? I am glad to hear this is something the Minister of State is looking at for secondary legislation. I would love to know a little bit more about what she is thinking around the timeline because she obviously feels that is very important. There are certain issues she feels cannot be put into this legislation, which she thinks are likely to go into others. Could she say a little bit about the secondary legislation and if there is a timeline and what her thoughts are around that? --- 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/2026-01-29/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:34+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-29