Owenacurra to be raised at Oireachtas committee on mental health

When asked about the Owenacurra facility in Midleton, John Farrelly said the Commission had not been asked to speak to the Oireachtas Committee about an individual centre. File picture

The Mental Health Commission is calling for the introduction of three pieces of legislation to ensure Ireland is compliant with the UN Convention on the rights of people with disability.

Chief executive John Farrelly, who will address an Oireachtas committee on Thursday, said he wants the rights of people with mental health illness all over the country to be vindicated. The lack of services for those people was something we should be ashamed about as a State, he said.

“We don’t have the services to give those people what they need — that's something that we should be ashamed about as a State and that's one of the reasons we're going to the committee," said Mr Farrelly.

"Just because these people are the most vulnerable — they don't fit the criteria of happy, clappy mental health, these are mentally ill people who need real services and we need to make sure that as a State we are providing for them.” 

Asked about the Owenacurra facility in Midleton, Mr Farrelly said the Commission had not been asked to speak to the Oireachtas Committee about an individual centre. As the Commission regulates individual centres, he said he could not compromise any enforcement or regulatory action that was ongoing.

There was a significant number of people within the mental health services, who also fit the criteria of a person with a disability because it is an enduring mental illness, he said.

The Commission will address three pieces of legislation needed to ensure Ireland is compliant with the Convention:

• New mental health legislation to ensure that people's rights are vindicated and that particularly residences in the community where 1,200 people live and services in the community for vulnerable people that they are regulated;
• The Assisted Decision Making Capacity Act, which could take thousands of people out of wardship and give them their rights;
• Safeguarding legislation.

“At this moment in Ireland there's safeguarding teams within the HSE. Those teams will see people who are within the elderly services who are within the intellectual disability services, they will not see people who are in the mental health services so by virtue of a person having an enduring mental health illness they don't get access to this safeguarding," Mr Farrelly told RTÉ radio's Morning Ireland.

"In 1984 we started closing down all the big hospitals — we took all those people out and we built new units and those units are good — there is 90% compliance, there are about 15 units that are not great, but generally much better.

"However, we took a lot of the people that were institutionalised and they went out into residences in the community, generally speaking, they were 10-bed residences."

Mr Farrelly said that when these residences were inspected, they "weren't great", citing the lack of regulation, multi-occupancy rooms and lack of privacy.

The idea had been that those people would move on from the residence into their own housing with support in the community but that did not happen.

"Those people have remained trapped in those large institutions — that might have been okay then, but we now accept as a society that 10 people sharing rooms in houses that aren't regulated, that's not good enough anymore," he said.

“What we're saying is we need to move on with intellectual disability where people are living in proper homes, having their own bed, living with no more than four people, in your own bedroom and enjoying life.”