Mental Health Services Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-15 ============================================================ Mary Butler (FF), Waterford I thank the Senator for raising this important matter in the House today and for her consistent and persistent advocacy in support of expanding youth mental health services in Kildare. This is not new to the Senator. She has been doing this for as long as I have known her, over her ten years in these Houses, in advocating for positive youth mental health supports, positive well-being and those crisis interventions when they are needed most. In developing child and youth mental health services, the HSE aims to promote positive mental health. The Senator is quite right in what she said. We have about 1.2 million young people under 18 in Ireland now. Ten or 12 years ago that figure was about 900,000 so there is more of a demand for services. The Senator is also quite right that only 2% of young people thankfully will need the support of CAMHS. However there are a lot of other supports that we need to provide, whether through youth clubs, Foróige, family resource centres or the likes of Jigsaw, early interventions or primary care psychology. All of that working together can support an awful lot of young people so they do not end up needing the support of CAMHS. I have worked with Jigsaw since coming into this role six years ago and compliment it on the work it does. Jigsaw will receive almost €16.5 million from the HSE under a service level agreement in 2026 from the mental health budget, to provide youth mental health services for those with mild to moderate mental health difficulties. As the Senator is quite aware, no new physical Jigsaw locations had been funded between 2020 and 2025, when the organisation pivoted to develop a suite of new digital services. I want to make it really clear that no matter where people are in the country, they can contact Jigsaw online. However, after Covid it became very clear again that young people like the physical interaction of being able to go to a physical location. In 2022 I opened a Jigsaw in Tipperary, which had been funded previously. We have not opened one since because the digital services were available to all young people. Jigsaw also went through a restructuring phase and has come out of that really well. It has reduced the waiting list, which is really important. We are currently working closely with it to support the expansion of Jigsaw services to Waterford and the south east, as well as to County Clare. The location of Waterford was picked because we have no services in the south east at all. It is great that we will have the hub and spoke model the Senator spoke about. Jigsaw will be based in the city but will have a spoke into west Waterford and other areas of the south east. It is also expanding to County Clare. We have a Jigsaw in Limerick and we are going to put a spoke in there. Kildare is high on my agenda in respect of Jigsaw. It speaks for itself, with the statistics the Senator has provided and the number of young people. The HSE working with Jigsaw would have the ultimate decision on location but Newbridge having 36% of the population really speaks to a massive demand. We are just starting with the Estimates process now and I will be working really hard to secure the funding to expand a youth mental health service provision, as these go out to tender as well. My aim is to make sure that there will be another presence of Jigsaw within budget 2027. The Senator's area is very high up on the list to deliver a Jigsaw. We have a few areas that specifically need them, we all know where they are and Kildare is one of them. I will continue to work with the Senator on this because it is really important. I was able to work very closely with Waterford City and County Council to secure a premises in Waterford. It is very difficult to provide the funding for the premises plus the services. If we were able to rent a premises in a particular area, working with local authorities and the community on the ground, it is very helpful. --- 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/2026-07-15/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:52:16+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-15