Mental Health Services
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-15
============================================================

Fiona O'Loughlin (FF), Administrative Panel

I thank the Minister of State for her positive response. In terms of premises, I had meetings with Jigsaw over the years in Newbridge and we did look at various premises. No later than yesterday, I spoke to the chief executive of Kildare County Council in relation to this. Local councillors Noel Heavey and Rob Power had a motion tabled in Kildare County Council regarding premises. As we all know, the population of Kildare has really expanded. We are actually short on space for existing services. Having said that, I have written to local estate agents and I have made contacts to other commercial entities within the area. I do appreciate that having the right space is important. We need to have a big space for Jigsaw to function. Hopefully it would be Jigsaw although I appreciate that it needs to go out to tender. We feel in conversation that we would need to have quite a sizable premises. I am undertaking that work together with the authorities. I know the Minister of State will appreciate that Newbridge is just totally squeezed. We do not even have a community centre there, which is shocking in itself. We need to have more. We have started that search. I am working with Jigsaw and certainly would hope, in conversations we have had with it, that we will have a positive announcement at budget time. That is really why I wanted to have the Commencement debate now. We know the Minister of State is working very assiduously with the Minister for Finance and the Minister for public expenditure in relation to getting the services but also rightly getting value for money. This has to be an absolute priority and I appreciate the positivity from the Minister of State today.

---

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