Amnesty reports State fails needs of mentally ill children

Political Reporter

The Amnesty report, which is highly critical of the Government, found:

There are more than 2,000 children stranded on waiting lists for psychiatric assessments, some of them waiting for up to a year.

Children who have been abused have to wait up to three months for psychological assessment in Dublin;

Outside of Dublin and Galway there are no in-patient services available for children under the age of 16 in danger of harming themselves.

A lack of special care units for non-offending children, which means troubled children can be placed in adult detention centres, prisons and hospitals a practice in direct contravention of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

According to the report, up to 20% of those under the age of 18 will experience a disabling mental illness during their development and the incidence of childhood depression and suicide are increasing.

Among the recommendations of today's report, the Government is urged to establish a unified interdepartmental response to childhood mental health involving the combined efforts of the juvenile justice system, the social services and the education system.

A report by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in 1998 found Ireland lacked the adequate programmes and services needed to address the mental health of children. However, despite the fact the Government will again have to report to the UN committee next year, today's report points the finger at several major failures on the Government's part.

Amnesty's Irish director, Sean Love said: "The Irish Government should be striving for the highest attainable protection for its children's mental health, not the minimum. This is Ireland's voluntarily assumed responsibility under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child."

Mr Love said such neglect made little long-term financial sense.

"In these days of value for money discussions about healthcare, the Government surely must acknowledge that investment in children's mental health has enormous benefits for the future of society," he said.

Meanwhile, the National Association for the Mentally Handicapped in Ireland (NAMHI) yesterday expressed concern at the suggestion by Junior Justice Minister Willie O'Dea that the Government's forthcoming disability bill would include financial restrictions on the right to an assessment of need.

"The minister says it would be wrong to give people rights to services that do not exist, for example, speech and language services. By allowing a deciding officer to say that the resources are not there so you have no right to the service means that there will never be any impetus to develop such services," a NAMHI spokesperson said.

The Government's long-awaited disability bill, which was abandoned last year following criticism that it did not provide for guaranteed rights, is due to be published in the forthcoming autumn Dáil term.