A Bill reforming the criminal law on insanity was severely criticised yesterday by a consultant psychiatrist at the Central Mental Hospital, Dundrum, Dublin.
Dr Harry Kennedy said the Criminal Law (Insanity) Bill lacked a number of important protections and would require, according to one estimate, more than 100 amendments to put it right.
The Bill, which is currently before the Oireachtas, updates the law on insanity in criminal trials for the first time in over a century.
Dr Kennedy, addressing the SIPTU nursing convention in Dublin, said there were many good things in the Bill, such as a right of appeal against detention and a section giving patients modern mental health rights.
He had a number of concerns, however. The Bill, for example, included a different definition of "mental disorder" than that contained in the Mental Health Act of 2001. The definition in the new Bill was "rather broad and rather vague", and included terms "like mental handicap, which haven't actually been used in mental health legislation for years".
There were many protections for patients in the 2001 Act, he said, which had not been included in the new Bill.
Section 2 enabled the Minister for Health to designate a psychiatric centre or, with the consent of the Minister for Justice, a prison as a centre for the reception and detention of individuals.
"The suggestion that a prison might be equivalent to a psychiatric hospital is risible." While the Bill gave the Ministers power to decide where patients covered by the Bill would be detained, it was "silent" about what sort of standards should be applied to such centres.
The different definitions of mental disorder in the Mental Health Act and the new Bill would give rise to anomalies.
"There needs to be only one definition of mental disorder, and obviously it needs to be the definition in the Mental Health Act. Why should there be two sets of definitions and two sets of rights? That would be a very strange situation," he said.
