Departmental Reports
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-24
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Liam Quaide (SD), Cork East

The mental health strategy, A Vision for Change, is now 20 years old, but the State is still nowhere near providing the specialist multidisciplinary teams it promised for older people in that document. There are large parts of the country, including Dublin south-west, Limerick city-Tipperary north, Cork north and east, and Cork south and west, where the HSE has approved no occupational therapy posts at all for older adult mental health services. There are no approved psychology posts in Kildare-west Wicklow or Donegal. These are essential therapies to help to support older people and their families as they face mental health challenges in the context of ageing. What makes this even more serious is the lengths to which the HSE went to obscure these shortfalls. In January, I was told that the HSE did not maintain data on approved posts for these services, which is frankly farcical. The HSE's 2019 model of care for older persons, which contained clear staffing targets, disappeared offline shortly after I submitted my first parliamentary question, only to reappear immediately after the media queried its absence. What commitment can the Taoiseach give to the funding of multidisciplinary posts for older adult mental health teams?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-03-24/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:03+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-24