Mental Health Bill 2024: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-29
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Nicole Ryan (SF), Administrative Panel

I move amendment No. 337:
In page 149, between lines 19 and 20, to insert the following:
"5-year sharing the vision funding and implementation strategy
177. (1) The Minister shall, within 12 months of the passing of this Act, publish a five-year funding and implementation strategy for mental health services.
(2) The strategy referenced in subsection (1) shall be reviewed annually by the Mental Health Commission.
(3) The strategy shall place an emphasis on shifting care to community-based services as and where appropriate.".
This amendment relates to the five-year funding and implementation strategy. For a long time, we have had procedures, strategies, action plans, instances of independent oversight and implementation timelines, but we have not had a binding and transparent multi-year implementation and funding strategy written into law. This amendment seeks to change that. It requires the Minister, within 12 months of the passing of the Act, to publish a five-year funding and implementation strategy for mental health services. Failure in regard to mental health services reform is not due to a lack of ideas. Everybody in this House has fantastic ideas and the Minister of State has done fantastic work. Reform fails because of a lack of delivery and slow implementation. Mental health services cannot just be built on annual budget cycles and one-off funding announcements. Our system sometimes operates on pilot projects, temporary streams, short-term allocations and stop-start reforms in different areas. This amendment seeks to move away from that chaos and put in place a planned and properly structured system.
Amendment No. 348 is concerned with enhancing the Minister of State's work. For a long time, mental health policy in the State has been built on partial information, fragmented reporting and an inability to say with clarity how many people need care, what care they need, where the gaps are and what it would cost to fix the system. We all know about the gaps in mental health services in our own areas. We hear about them all the time from people who come to us when they cannot access services or find it really difficult to do so for a variety of reasons. I acknowledge the work the Minister of State has done in getting the system from where it was to where it is now. However, without statistics and numbers, I imagine it is very hard to do her job. This amendment places a clear statutory duty on the HSE to keep and maintain records for the purpose of identifying people receiving mental health supports, identifying the services being provided and by whom, specifying the needs identified by the services and identifying those who are not receiving services or are not receiving them in full. That is exactly what a modern public health system should be doing as standard. One of the most damaging features of the current system is that the unmet need is largely invisible. We can only work to what we can see but there is a whole cohort of people who cannot be reached for various reasons and suffer in silence. We all hear the anecdotes about the caseload and the families in crisis but we do not have a picture of what that looks like nationally. This amendment seeks to change that.

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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