Developers who buy land occupied by some of the State's largest psychiatric hospitals should not be allowed buy their way out of an obligation to provide accommodation for mentally ill patients in new housing developments, an organisation representing patients with schizophrenia said yesterday.
John Saunders, director of Schizophrenia Ireland, said he did not want to see a repeat of what happened with government plans in the year 2000 to get builders to earmark 20 per cent of private development land for social and affordable housing.
Last August it was reported that the developer of the Killiney Court hotel in Killiney, Co Dublin, which was being turned into apartments, had paid Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council €1,257,000 in lieu of building social and affordable housing on the site.
Mr Saunders said this should not happen again when the Government's plan to sell off 200-plus acres of land occupied by 15 psychiatric hospitals is implemented.
But he said the proposal to change public sector tendering rules so as to oblige developers who buy this land to build new community care alternatives for people with mental illness were welcome.
The new tendering rules are to be announced in coming months. They will oblige successful bidders for this land to build facilities such as sheltered housing or community care centres for about 1,000 psychiatric patients due to be relocated from psychiatric hospitals.
"We will watch to ensure that this commitment does not buckle under pressure from vested interests, as happened with the legislation on social and affordable housing," Mr Saunders said.
"We don't want to see long-stay psychiatric patients being fobbed off by allowing developers to pay financial compensation instead of providing new community-based facilities, as has happened in the social and affordable housing sector," he added.
He said his organisation fully supported the plan to close psychiatric hospitals and use the money their sale generated to provide services in the community for patients with mental illness. "We want mental illness brought from the margins to the mainstream," he said.