There are no guarantees that funding for key mental health and suicide prevention services will be immune to cuts in the upcoming budget, Minister of State for Mental Health John Moloney said today.
Mr Moloney said "the reality" was that €700 million needed to be cut from the health budget and that he faced a challenge to ensure mental health service were protected.
"The fact of the matter is that this year we have had an increase in suicide in this country to over 500," he said.
"Quite clearly we need extra resources if we are to tackle and deliver and it is my responsibility to convince Government of that need for funding."
He said he had already presented his case to Minister for Health Mary Harney and Taoiseach Brian Cowen but accepted that nothing could be ring-fenced in the current climate.
Speaking at a mental health conference in Dublin this morning, Mr Moloney said the Government was experiencing difficulties generating €50 million that had been pledged to the sector from the sale of land. This was because of the economic downturn, he said.
Earlier, HSE assistant national director of mental health Martin Rogan told the conference that no new money had been provided for mental health services in either 2008 or 2010.
The Government's mental health strategy Vision for Change promised to invest an extra €150 million in the sector over a period of seven years.
Mr Rogan said this money arrived in 2006 and 2007 but that it was proving difficult to reach the target of more than 8 per cent of the health budget going towards mental health services as set out in the strategy. He said the proportion of the health budget spent on mental health had fallen from 23 per cent in 1966 to 6.7 per cent in 2009 and 5.3 per cent this year.
In spite of the difficulties securing funding, Mr Rogan said a considerable number of mental health projects were being worked on and that the HSE was committed to making the best possible use of the resources available to it.
John Lonergan, the former governor of Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, told the conference there was a strong link between poverty, mental illness and criminality.
"Most people who end up in prison come from very disadvantaged areas, about 90 per cent of them are poor people," he said. "Their environments, I believe, contribute significantly to their development or underdevelopment, as a result of that criminality is an option for them that wouldn't be if they had [grown up elsewhere]."
