Maternal Mental Health Supports: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-11 ============================================================ Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel I echo the support for Senator Cosgrove for bringing this motion forward. I am delighted we were able to use our time in the Cross-Party Group for this. Here are just a few quotes from women talking about their experiences after having their children: "I got one phone call in the six weeks after I gave birth and the one question I can recall that nurse asking me was if I loved my child", "My mental health was only important while pregnant" and "After a traumatic birth I developed anxiety disorder." For women, childbirth is the most profound and life-changing event they will ever experience, and yet the maternity infant scheme in Ireland has not been updated for 27 years. Generations and generations more of women in Ireland have experienced under-resourced services and limited provisions. Maternal care ending just six weeks after birth is archaic. Six short weeks after giving birth, as we know and as we have heard, a mother is often still physically and mentally recovering, hormone levels are fluctuating, sleep deprivation is intense and the demands of caring for newborns are relentless. At this point formal maternity support largely disappears. By then, a partner, if there is one, will have returned to work, routines resume and the expectation is that the mother is "over it", that she has had the baby and that life goes on. For many women, however, this is exactly when the difficulties begin rather than end. Physical recovery can take months, even after an uncomplicated pregnancy and birth, and complications can extend that time significantly. I am sure we all have horrifying stories to tell of friends and loved ones going through incredibly traumatic birth experiences that have made recovery very difficult. It is in this period that emotional challenges can deepen. What begins as the baby blues does not always resolve and can develop into postnatal depression or anxiety if left unsupported. The National Childbirth Trust describes the post-birth period as the fourth trimester, the crucial stage of adjustment for both baby and parent. While attention naturally centres on the newborn, the needs of mothers are too often overlooked. Yet supporting mental health recovery during this period is essential, not only for women's health, which is crucial, but for the well-being of families and children in the long term. It is this crucial stage, the perinatal stage, that for some women can be extremely difficult. We need to do better. Perinatal care for women in Ireland remains underdeveloped, despite the clear need and evidence and despite previous policy commitments. Perinatal mental health difficulties can affect up to one in five women during pregnancy and the first year after birth, yet we continue to lack a fully resourced multidisciplinary mental health unit. The national maternity strategy, which was published ten years ago in 2016 explicitly promised the establishment of that unit and that we would have multidisciplinary care, yet we wait and the women of Ireland wait. The absence of this dedicated unit means that women experiencing severe mental ill health during pregnancy or post partum are often treated in general adult psychiatric settings. This is where huge issues around post partum can take place. Women are frequently also separated from their babies. This undermines the bonding process and can make the trauma worse at an extremely vulnerable time for women and their families. It is unfair that families are left to navigate these incredibly fragmented and inconsistent supports. That unit needs to be brought to fruition as soon as possible to improve the outcomes for mothers and their babies, to reduce long-term mental ill health and the social costs and to fulfil a promise to mothers in this country that we have had for a decade. I echo what Senator Flynn said about regionalisation and support for rural mothers and women living in rural areas. Rural living can cause isolation in general, but that is compounded for new mothers. They cannot hop out onto the street and pound the pavements with a newborn baby in the same way. They have to wrangle the child into the car to find somewhere safe to walk, for example. I acknowledge, like many other people here have done, the work of Aolish Gormley, in developing her Year of Care campaign. She has created a vision for maternal health in Ireland: a vision where a mother is not isolated after six weeks; a vision where a mother does not feel alone and does not struggle in silence; and a vision that is about meeting a mother where she is, prioritising her care both physically and emotionally to allow her to thrive and create those healthy structures, which are crucial baselines for a family. This is at the core about equity. It is at the core a women's rights issue. It says that no matter the socioeconomic background, the ethnicity or where a woman lives, postnatal care and supports should be available to all mothers. I am delighted that there has been a commitment from the Government to pursue these specific requests. Women's health has a lot of challenges in Ireland, and the commitment the Minister laid out will be a step towards addressing some of those gaps. --- 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/2026-02-11/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:37+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-11