00:00Suicide prevention and saving lives should and does unite us all. It united us five years ago
00:07when we all stood here making the same argument to fund this critical crisis intervention service
00:14in Derry, an area with a shamefully high suicide rate. It's shameful that once more we have a
00:22fight on our hands to reinstate a service that quite literally saved lives but was forced to
00:28close a couple of months ago when funding from the mental health support fund ended.
00:33We all know here of the devastating statistics. We know mental health exists on a complex continuum
00:39so any adequate response should mean that these vital services are sustained and bolstered further
00:45by additional work across all our departments. At any one time individual, family and relationship,
00:53community or structural inequalities can all interact to either protect or undermine
00:58a person's mental health and well-being. The more exposed you are to adverse experiences and
01:03circumstances, the more challenging it is to maintain resilience and bounce back from hardship.
01:09We're all aware, some painfully so, that Northern Ireland continues to face a mental health crisis of
01:15unprecedented scale. Our region continues to suffer from disproportionately high rates of suicide, self-harm
01:22and depression, worsened by poverty, social isolation and intergenerational trauma. The closure of Externs
01:31crisis intervention service in FOIL didn't close because it was ineffective. In fact, the opposite was true.
01:39Since its launch, it has supported over 3,500 individuals in distress and out of hours care. This was a critical support
01:48service which offered safety, listening ears, crisis de-escalation and links to longer-term support.
01:56But this is particularly pertinent for Derry because, as has been mentioned already, in the last year,
02:03funding has been cut for Northlands. Men's Action Network has closed and this is just another one of many services
02:10which has been cut. And I think it is particularly pertinent in our area because people aren't just
02:17being discriminated against because of their mental health needs, but they're also being discriminated
02:23against because of their postcode and that simply isn't good enough. So I would ask today, what is the
02:29solution to this that the Department of Health are coming up with? Are people going to sit in A&E?
02:35So on the question of funding for CCIS, as one member has pointed out, it was initially Derry and
02:41Straban District Council who funded it as a pilot from 2018 to 2021. There was some support from the
02:49Health and Social Care Board in 2020 by way of £27,000 and subsequently some funding from my department
02:57to allow the project to continue. From Autumn 2021 to March of this year, Extern received £504,989
03:07from the Mental Health Support Fund via the Community Foundation. Now, this was a one-off,
03:14three-year scheme to support mental health organisations funded using unspent COVID-19 funds
03:21and with all the resources allocated and the well-documented position of my department in terms
03:26of the budget, that has now ended. A further £42,300 of non-recurrent funding was identified from within
03:35my department to allow an extension until June of this year, but unfortunately, with our ongoing
03:40extreme budget challenges, no further funds could be found. Via Extern, CCIS then applied to the core
03:48grant scheme for the 25-26 funding round, but was not successful. And I want to turn to this,
03:54Principal Deputy Speaker, because two members have said that the department withdrew funding,
03:59as if that was a deliberate act by the department. It was not. It is inaccurate and it is unfair to
04:06suggest it was. When I looked at the core grant scheme when I was appointed minister, it was frozen.
04:14I wanted to bring it back, but I also wanted to review it because it hadn't changed in over 20 years.
04:19No charity set up in the past 20 years could have applied to the old scheme. We worked with NCFA,
04:26we worked with NCFA, the Council for Voluntary Action, who facilitated workshops where we got the
04:32voluntary and community sector to tell us how it should be redesigned. And it is an unfortunate fact
04:39that when Northlands applied, they were unsuccessful. We didn't withdraw our funds from Northlands.
04:45We didn't withdraw all the funds from CCIS. They were simply unsuccessful in their applications.
04:51I'll give way.
04:53Thanks to the Minister for giving way. Minister, you mentioned that the department had not
04:58removed funds from the core grant scheme. The core grant scheme when it was initially set up was £3.6
05:03million per year, and it was halved to £1.8 million per year. So many groups and services who deliver very
05:11vital services across Northern Ireland lost the ability to continue to do that work.
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