Mental Health Bill 2024: Report and Final Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-16
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Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel

I support the amendment. I will build on some of what Senator Cosgrove said about the idea of having a safeguard. Amendment No. 34 has been ruled out of order because it would fully prohibit admitting children into adult psychiatric units, which would create a cost for the State. When we talked about this at different sessions, the Minister of State spoke quite at length about how this is affecting very few children in terms of the overall numbers because of the work that has been done. She also spoke about the desire not to tie the hands of clinicians and how important that is, particularly if the option is to have the child nowhere safe because of the challenges that arise. To home in on the language around the emergency piece, I think the Minister of State would agree this is only done in emergency circumstances and that is where this wording comes from, recognising the challenges in the current context of the delivery of services. We see the amendment as putting in place a statutory safeguard so we do not leave too much to discretion. We can have situations where there are severe bed shortages for a range of reasons, or severe pressures on the systems, and we want to have it explicitly said that this is for an emergency. The terminology "in so far as is practicable" is a little ambiguous whereas "emergency circumstances" is a bit clearer.

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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