Mental Health Services
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-21
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Mary Butler (FF), Waterford

I thank the Deputy for raising this really important issue in relation to suicides in our country. I welcome the opportunity to respond to him because we do not spend enough time speaking about suicide. It goes without saying that even one death by suicide is one too many. I offer my condolences to the family of Stephen McCarthy and the 14-year-old child the Deputy said will be buried this week. It is a really difficult time for their families. One death by suicide has a huge effect on families, the community, neighbours and school and work communities. It is something I have been working very hard on for the past while. We are currently developing a new Connecting for Life strategy with the National Office for Suicide Prevention. I sat down last week with the deputy chief medical officer, Professor Philip Dodd, and went through the first draft. I will launch it next month. We are very close to having it finalised.
Reducing self-harm and suicide is a priority for this Government. That was evident in the way I tailored the budget for this year. An additional investment of over €15 million will fund new initiatives to support those in a mental health crisis. These include new specialist nursing teams working out of hours for all model 4 hospital emergency departments to support the non-consultant hospital doctors, NCHDs. We have nine model 4 hospitals and ten hospitals have been prioritised in total, namely, the nine model 4 hospitals and the Mercy Hospital in Cork, because it had 1,200 presentations last year relating to self-harm and suicidal ideation. Each of those hospitals will receive four nurses. They will be clinical nurse specialists and advanced nurse practitioners who can prescribe. They will work in the emergency department out of hours supporting the NCHDs. This is important because we have really good teams in place in emergency departments but we always have that issue out of hours, which can be very difficult. I will continue to expand the model 3 hospitals in next year’s budget. As a result of not being able to fund the model 3 hospitals in this year's budget - because I have to do it step by step and incrementally - I prioritised three areas for a crisis resolution team and a solace café. One was Donegal, one was the midlands and the other was Kerry. There is recurring funding of €1.3 million that will put in place a crisis resolution team that will work out of hours from Thursday to Monday from approximately 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. until 11 p.m. A crisis resolution team makes an intervention that may not necessarily have to happen in a hospital or clinical setting. They can support the Garda with an incident its members may be called to. It will also provide funding for a solace café. I currently have six of those open around the country. I opened one in Sligo during the summer. There is one open in Galway quite a while, ones opened in Limerick and Galway in only the past couple of weeks, there is one in Dublin and one on Sullivan's Quay in Cork. What these cafés have been shown to do is reduce presentations to emergency departments by 18%. It is clinically led but it is also peer-led and there are people with lived experience. It is an alternative to having to present to the emergency department, which is really important.
I am very familiar with the SCANs and have built the scheme incrementally in all six budgets since coming into my role. I recently visited Donegal where we have the SCAN U scheme. The medics in Donegal did this all on their own. These are SCANs for people aged under 18. In last year's budget I secured the funding to put two SCANs in CAMHS for the first time ever. They are in Portiuncula up on that side of the country because the area had the highest presentations of young Travellers with suicidal ideation and self-harm. We are making a lot of steps but I will speak directly about SCANs when I come back in.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-31T01:00:51+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-21