Ms. Harney, this is SIMPLY NOT GOOD ENOUGH

 i feel it is an OUTRAGE for human beings to neglect the least well off in health terms and as i have said on these issues a CRIME - against humanity and i have to, simply have to point the finger at Ms Harney our Minister for Health.
When so much was hoped for, so many people ploughing in FREE time and expertise, into the valuable document 'vision for change' it is an insult to that input of hope and vision for changes.
Ms. Harney, when we considered all the implications of the then mental health services and considered them in tandem with providers, carers, staff and most of all the 'expert patients,' I unashamedly admit being one, to drop the level of funding to 5% is a CRIME - against HUMANITY.

All the persons involved in this document had integrity in common.
To CHANGE our service for so many Irish people suffering so badly.
You cannot slash the budget to this level.  You have thrown all and sundry basically into the streets of social housing without any community care team practises set up.  this was the first stupid act for so called change to 'community care,'
now we are going to see, no community care, no inpatient care, no community nurses, day centres and all the patients, actually not patients but PEOPLE who happen to be different, live a life of no worth or hope but growing brain dead on medication for want of stimulation, therapy and a place to go for company, security and friendship.

What Ms. Harney do you propose these people do during a day of say depression without a visitor.
A day with a psychotic episode which brings abject terror, to shut inside alone with that sort of thinking and despair and fright, again without a visitor.
What do you propose people to do during a day when they know themselves that they will not receive a kind word, a smile, a chat or even be able to build a relationship or a person for companionship. Do YOU feel the isolation all these groups of people have in common. NO, and many do not.

so you start a suicide prevention programme!  You start that before you start 'Vision for Change' and you start it on the cusp of degrading peoples lives through unemployment, repossesion of their homes, family strife and trauma and again the lonely and sick are left alone knowing this.  They know full well, a cut will mean more isolation and more dependency on strong medication.

This is a very shocking thing to say Ms. Harney, why don't you round up all the mentally ill and psychologically challenged, the brain damaged little children and adults, the people who have been raped and traumatised for life, the abused people children and adults of religious, the abused people of the various institutions through the decades, the poor on the bridges with the plastic cup, the heroin addicts, the alcoholics, the penniless, the adolescents who are engaging in anti social behaviour, those who have asperger or autism, those with learning difficulties, deafness, blindness and those in wheelchairs and those trapped in old age in the dying cages and put em all along the equivilant of the GREAT wall of China and shot them and me?
what will you then have left to deal with?
Rogues, the bankers, civil servants, the government, the universities and their staff, the museums and art galleries and their staff and participators, and of course you will need the plumbers to unblock your toilets.
but once you have the basics of money and its riches and what it can provide you can sit back and act, the zombie, the persons who have it all to yourselves and not think twice of the rotting corpses in the so called lower stata of society.
This day of human disintegration seems to be acting out in our political domain, irregardless of who it effects or hurts, and be sure it wont hurt you.
I am ashamed of my government who stoops so low to cap the budget on mental health spending to 5% of the health services provision.  That is more than half of what it was in the year of the publication of 'vision for change' which you were expected to launch but didnt show up!

The brief you have as Minister for Health means just that, but alas we also have the incompetent HSE, which was supposed to have been changed around (also) by Mr. Brendan Drumm and in fact, it is far worse under his charge than it ever was.

Lets all start 'praying' at least that costs nothing and may do more than our governments and departments of health!