Mental Health Bill 2024: Report and Final Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-16
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Mary Butler (FF), Waterford

While there are a significant number of amendments in this grouping, they all relate to smaller amendments. These amendments are being introduced to provide clarity or consistency with wording elsewhere. There are no policy changes in this grouping. To pick some examples from this group, amendment No. 30 removes a comma from between the words "Act" and "shall"; amendment No. 67 replaces the word "reviews" with "review"; and amendment No. 109 inserts a comma between the words "health professional" and "will". Since the Bill passed Committee Stage, officials across my Department and across the Office of Parliamentary Counsel and Attorney General's office have been reviewing the Bill line by line. This is the last opportunity to amend and improve the Bill. Considering this, I gave additional time to allow for more reviews and readings of the Bill to take place. The Bill is almost 200 pages long already and contains 234 sections. On Committee and Report Stage in the Dáil and on Committee Stage in the Seanad, I introduced a large number of amendments at each stage to improve the Bill based on continued consultation with stakeholders. Considering the size and complexity of the Bill, as well as the many amendments that have been introduced, it is to be expected that a number of technical amendments will be required to consider and to ensure consistency, address typographical and grammatical errors and improve clarity. This is what this grouping does.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-04-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-16