Psychiatric services - Jailing a sick man is not the answer

YESTERDAY a Nigerian, who has been charged with trying to sleep naked in a crib in the Redemptorist Church in Limerick on December 29, was remanded to prison following an assault in a hotel where he was accommodated by the State.

The man with an obvious and urgent need for psychiatric attention was in the hotel because we couldn’t do anything better for him. Now he’s in jail.

The only thing he — and so many others — has done wrong was to be ill in one of the world’s richest countries. A country with twice the comparable number of mentally ill people on remand in the justice — not health — system as are held in similar counties.