Central Mental Hospital at Thornton warning

LOCATING A new central mental hospital on the same site as a new prison would lead to the "further stigmatisation" of mental illness, an Oireachtas committee has been told.

Co-locating a new mental hospital with a Mountjoy replacement prison at the Thornton Hall site in north Co Dublin would be "wrong", and the result would "have to be endured by the patients and families for the next 150 years at least", the CMH Carers' Group said.

Susie Donaghy, a member of the group, told the Joint Committee on Children and Mental Health it was ironic that the Victorians, who had built the hospital at its current site in Dundrum, Dublin, in 1843 had decided against co-locating it with Mountjoy Prison "in recognition of the distinction between illness and criminality".

It was ironic they could be so enlightened when, 150 years later, politicians were proposing co-locating the new hospital with a prison.

Kaye Marshall of the same group said the belief that the new hospital should be beside a prison because many of the patients came via the criminal justice system was flawed.

"This thinking is, at best, based on administrative convenience. It fails to acknowledge the fact that it is because of their mental illness that such patients come into the criminal justice system in the first place."

Ms Marshall added: "Those with mental illness are already stigmatised. Locating the national forensic psychiatric hospital beside a prison will in effect be a public endorsement of this stigma. There is no possible therapeutic reason to associate the hospital with the new prison."

Tony Francis said the proposed location was against best international practice. A hospital had a fundamentally different culture and ethos to that of a prison, which was custodial rather than therapeutic. He predicted the prison culture would be dominant on the Thornton Hall site and would prevail.