Sinéad O’Connor’s last lesson was staring at us from front pages when she died. Act on the Camhs report

On the day the news of Sinéad O’Connor’s death monopolised media coverage in Ireland, there was another dark story being reported on. An independent review of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Camhs) said it cannot be assured that parents and guardians seeking mental healthcare for their children have services that are “safe, effective, and evidence-based”.

This is damning. Inspector of mental health services Susan Finnerty said that Camhs is “creaking at the seams, with increasing risk to children for whom the service is provided”. There is poor governance, a failure to manage risk, funding and recruitment failures, ineffective leadership and negative feedback from young people accessing mental health services. This is something that can be “retraumatising … it can really make them feel not listened to, not heard and not valued” —failure to examine alternative models of service provision, and failure to provide a standardised service.

What this says is that children in the Republic in need of mental health care are being failed. This is especially acute for marginalised children in the poorest families. Listen to these alarm bells. As The Irish Times reported, Mental Health Reform, a coalition of 80 organisations, is deeply concerned. The Psychiatric Nurses Association characterised the report as “extremely worrying”.

Remembering Sinéad O’Connor

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O’Connor fought her entire life to highlight the plight of children, sometimes through her own past, and risked everything she had gained through her talent and work to do this. She lost her 17-year-old son Shane in 2021, who had been hospitalised.

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“Tusla are working with very limited resources,” O’Connor subsequently wrote. Even in her grief, she had empathy for those trying to help. “The issue is,” she wrote, in relation to mental health services for children and young people, “we are a third-world country”. One may object to that term, but the sentiment speaks to the disquiet writ large in this latest report.

People talk about the taboos O’Connor broke in targeting the cruelty of the Catholic Church, but it speaks volumes that the State could eventually at least try to contend with that, but not with her persistent declarations about the need for a dramatically greater understanding of mental health care and its resourcing, often articulated through her own personal challenges. Are we ever going to tackle that with something that moves beyond long-fingering and wellness-speak and into proper resourcing?

[ Camhs reliance on paper records a ‘significant burden’ on overstretched staff, audit finds ]

[ Report on Camhs failings ‘validates experiences’ of young people trying to access service ]

I struggle with an element of the reaction to O’Connor’s death that states: “We didn’t deserve her.” That sort of guilt and shame is what O’Connor, and people like her, fought and fight to eviscerate. And yes, there is guilt permeating some of the reactions to her death, but guilt and shame are paralysing things. They are impositions of stasis. They demand a wallowing that defies action.

But if you weren’t one of the people who denied her the space to be heard, if you thought she was bang on, if you knew she was right, if you were inspired by her, if you connected with what she was doing and saying because you felt its resonance, then don’t feel guilty. You were on her side. We deserved Sinéad O’Connor. What we didn’t deserve was a context that sought to undermine her. What we didn’t deserve was the insecure viciousness that permeated the often stupid and cruel reaction to her truth-telling. What we don’t deserve now is an inadequate State and its ancillary services failing our children when they are at their most vulnerable.

There are children struggling in this country and their needs are so far behind being met collectively that what is required now is a radical, urgent response. O’Connor equated the emotional state of Ireland as a nation to that of an abused child. We were all children once. We all struggled in different ways. Most of us know the trauma of emotional rejection growing up in a country where very few people had the tools to express love openly, where we were overly disciplined, and where we grew into self-directed individuals not because of our contexts, but despite them.

[ The Irish Times view on the report on Camhs: a service creaking at the seams ]

The children who are struggling can’t heal themselves without a proper system. If they grow up without the things they’re calling out for now, their needs become even harder to meet. We know well not to repeat the cycle, and not to deny the things children in this country so vitally require in order to reach such a simple point of stability and contentment. This is an emergency. We know it is because we know some children don’t make it.

I’ve always felt Sinéad O’Connor was a teacher. But understanding and acting on her lessons requires listening and processing. When she died, I wondered, what is she teaching us now? If our reaction is so visceral, devastated, sorrowful and profound, then what’s the lesson? One was staring at us from the same front pages and inside the same newspapers that splashed her image on their covers: the Government needs to act immediately on this report.

We’ve plenty of cash in the coffers, apparently. So do it. No excuses. No delays. Concern is not enough, action is required. If we can’t make them do it out of guilt or shame, then maybe we can do what O’Connor did and scream until the demand is heard and met.