Debate contribution: Mental Health Provision in Northern Ireland

Debate contribution by Miss Órlaithí Flynn on 30 September 2024.

MLA

Miss Órlaithí Flynn

Party at the time

Sinn Féin

Date

30 September 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Opposition Business

Heading

Mental Health Provision in Northern Ireland

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4563486

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I thank the Member who tabled the motion. Colin and Diane mentioned some of the statistics around deaths by suicide. As Colin said, when we are talking about the issues and using numbers and figures, we are talking about the impact on people's lives and their families. There are over 200 deaths by suicide a year, with provisional figures for 2023 showing a slight increase, thus perhaps bringing the figure up to 221. We cannot have a conversation about mental health and suicide prevention without mentioning the 585 lives that have been lost as a result of drug deaths over the past three years, with the biggest killer being alcohol, which accounts for around 350 deaths every single year. The sad thing to note in this debate is that all those deaths were preventable somewhere along the line. Given that drug and alcohol deaths have doubled over the past 10 years, it is timely that we are having this debate today to try to refocus minds on how we can make some of this better. Over the past number of years, Sinn Féin has gathered with families that have been bereaved through suicide and drug deaths. We met families at the front of Stormont around Christmastime, when the Christmas trees were going up. Those families have been calling for the same thing that the motion calls for: more action, more cross-departmental working and more investment in tackling addiction and mental health. The Alliance Party joined us last year at the front of Stormont, and if the families, who are from right across the North, gather there again this year, I hope that every party will come out and talk to them. They are the people who have already lost their loved ones, and we need to take guidance from them about what we can do better and about how we can do it better.

I thank the Minister for personally meeting some of the families a number of weeks ago. I look forward to meeting, alongside him, the People's Kitchen charity. It is about directly meeting the people who are impacted on by these issues. The People's Kitchen works with some of the most vulnerable people who are, sadly, homeless and who are injecting on the streets. As for cross-departmental working, the structure for that is already there in the Executive subgroup that was set up a number of years ago on mental well-being, resilience and suicide prevention. That structure is there. It is about how we build on it. I genuinely think that the will is there, but how do we build on the cross-departmental structure that we already have in place? I want to talk briefly on the responsibility of individual Departments. Health has a responsibility, as Diane said, in what it does with its budget and how it prioritises things. Do I think that people are getting health services at the point of need, be they for addiction, a mental health crisis or a mental illness? I do not. I do not think that we are there yet. There is much more that the Department of Health can, hopefully, do in the time ahead. I will look at the Department of Education and what it's doing to address mental health. I welcome the Education Minister's recent announcement on reducing mobile phone usage in classrooms, which will have an impact on kids' well-being. Less screen time and more direct interaction are good things. Paul Givan has taken that positive step in Education, but hopefully he can take further steps, such as reintroducing the Happy Healthy Minds programme, which looked at the counselling provision that we have across our schools and youth clubs. It is about how you get into early intervention at the earliest possible stage. What more can the Department of Justice do to address mental health and addiction in prisons? How can it improve wrap-around care and rehabilitation for people in the prison system? How can it tackle the circulation and use of drugs in our prisons? Are there any plans to try to prevent the production and sale of the vapes filled with spice that are circulating in schools? I was at a mental health conference about two years ago, one of the speakers was asked, "What is the biggest cause of the mental health challenges here in the North?", and he just nailed it when he said, "Poverty, poverty, poverty". What more can the Department for Communities do to introduce an anti-poverty strategy to try to deal with homelessness and the people who are on the streets? It has been flagged up that there might be possible cuts to the Northern Ireland Housing Executive's out-of-hours service, which deals with those people who sleep on the streets and who inject drugs — the most vulnerable. When you talk about people with poor mental health, that is it. We need to be really conscious of all that. Hopefully, that is what the Executive subgroup can talk about and take on head first. To finish, Diane mentioned the work of the New Script mental health activists.

Their approach is around the fundamental shift in how we deal with mental health. That is the place where we all need to get to.

874 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:06 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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