Central Mental Hospital - State needs to listen to the experts

THE regrettable tendency of governments to steamroll over the opinions of experts for political ends is under the spotlight in today’s Irish Examiner exposé of serious concerns over plans to relocate the Central Mental Hospital alongside a new super prison.

Given the trenchant nature of objections raised by clinical director Dr Harry Kennedy there is now a compelling case for the incoming administration to revisit this controversy.

The psychiatrist has expressed his views forcefully in a personal letter to Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. In the course of this correspondence, obtained by the Irish Examiner through a Freedom of Information application, Dr Kennedy argues that “placing a hospital, even a secure forensic hospital, on the same site as a prison is about as bad an idea as it is possible to imagine”.