Mental Health Bill 2024: Committee Stage (Resumed) Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-29 ============================================================ Victor Boyhan (IND), Agricultural Panel I want to follow on from what Senator Black was saying. This was a very important amendment and this is a very important section. It deals with the regulations and registration, operation and management of mental health services. The section deals with a very important area. We have talked about complaints but there are also observations and investigations into the non-compliance rate. It will take a few minutes for me to illustrate my point. If we look at the Mental Health Commission report, I came in here today with the intention of naming the seven organisations that have very serious cases against them, which relate to issues of non-compliance, including critical issues. Then I thought about it. There are two categories and they amount to seven organisations in the mental health sector. I reached out to two of them. In fairness, it is not appropriate for me to name them because a lot of good work goes on in these organisations. There is also a lot of failure, however. We cannot rely on complaints; we must be vigilant. We have the Mental Health Commission. I will not go back over all the failures of the Mental Health Commission. I put on record my support generally for the Mental Health Commission. It does really good work. Its responsibilities are regulation, inspection, compliance, monitoring and enforcement. That is central to supporting the service users and the people who work in the service. That is an important role. It is part of the regulatory process. It also has an obligation under its vision, mission and value statement, which it publishes on its website. That has been a recurring theme of our debates in recent weeks in the sessions where we have been dealing with the Mental Health Bill. It must be person-centred, human-rights based, fundamentally 100% about quality, independence and accountability, dignity and respect, and of course at all times applying expertise. That is an important point to make. There are serious shortcomings in service providers. It is not good enough to suggest that we are all whistleblowers who are going to complain about the client services. I have spoken to a number of staff. I again give a call-out to the psychiatric nurses and all the allied professions and service providers in the mental health sector who do tremendous work. The more I speak to them, the more confidence I have, not in the legislation, but in their ability to use the whistleblower legislation or to pick up the phone to any TD or Senator. I would encourage anyone listening here today to do so if there is any form of abuse or question about the quality of care. They must reach out to the people involved. I want to put that on the record. We will be concluding our debate at 2 o'clock. That is important. This area deals with the regulation of the registration. There are also corporate governance policies in place for these providers of services. It is important that we somehow have a facility to capture the shortcomings. The Minister of State has powers in this legislation herself. This is why I brought it up. As she considers the annual report every year, which I am sure she does in detail, if things are flagged I want to be able to track them. The 2025 report will be out this year and I want to be able to come back in here and ask the Minister of State what she is doing about a report that was being prepared as we were speaking. That is about vigilance. That is our job and function. I do not want to be negative about this legislation in a year's time and say we pointed all this out, but like the two inspection staff, we suddenly could not find a legislative way of overcoming issues. If something happens in six months' time and we are told, sure we only have to do it every three years, that is not good for the patients that were intimidated and threatened in a particular service. What did we do about it? Not very much. We proposed something but we did not get support from the Minister or the Government if that was the case. The Minister of State was sympathetic but sympathetic is no good. She will move on, I will move on and we all move on. If we could enshrine it in the legislation, there would be some comfort that people could rely on the primary legislation and this is our primary function here today. Where the commission highlights serious shortcomings, as it has in its report on these seven organisations, some of which are not too far away from where we are standing, we have to have a system and the Minister of State and her officials have to fully exercise their powers to follow up and track them. Pointing them out is one thing but doing them is another. I have spoken to three of these seven institutions and have discovered there are still issues. We await the next report. What I am trying to say is that the Minister of State has huge powers and she needs to use those powers. Many of these are classified as being of critical concern. Each of them has critical concerns so there are two flags against each of these. --- 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