SEANAD REPORT: The Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children, Mr O'Malley, said that as a pharmacist he had to question the role that the pharmaceutical industry played in the education of the medical profession. He would have more to say on this issue at a later point in time.
Responding to a debate on suicide, the Minister said that one senator had referred to a survey which had been carried out by a company about attitudes to suicide.
"I would just ask all of you to think why should surveys about suicide be conducted by companies who have a vested interest in the treatment of suicide. I think the leadership should come from politicians and other leaders in society. As somebody who has been involved in this whole area for many years now, I see people with vested interests leading the whole thought process."
Mr Tom Morrissey (PD) said that none of the research he had read referred to the types of drugs people had been taking before they took their lives. "People tell their story to their doctor, who prescribes a medicine with the patient's interests at heart. In the event of the patient in question committing suicide, is research carried out to find out which medicines the victim was taking, whether they were prescribed by a medical practitioner or obtained at a chemist, and if they were made aware of the information available on the leaflet accompanying the medicine?"
Mr Brendan Ryan (Lab) said the term "loser" was now part of normal parlance, particularly among young people. It was a dreadful phrase which institutionalised the idea of competitive success. If this "hyped" concept was mixed with a state of affairs where young people were at a transitional stage of relationships and there was added in the ingredient of over-indulgence in alcohol, the result was a society where our youth were offered very limited structured values. We now had a society which had thrown away most of its taboos but had not replaced them with any culturally appropriate alternatives.
It was an extraordinary fact that our best-ever educated generation was indulging in tobacco abuse in the knowledge that it was harming them, Mr Ryan said. "There seems to be a problem about the belief in the worth of being alive. It's up to us as leaders in society, as people who have some influence on the culture of society, to deal with it at that level."
Mr Pat Moylan (FF) said statistics showed that there had been a substantial decline in the levels of suicide in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, the US and England. We should examine how we could learn from experiences in those parts of the world.
Mr John Hanafin (FF) said they needed to break the taboo about depression. "This can be done in the classroom, in the workplace, in the media and in the home. Depression is an illness and is treatable. Sadly, though, it is an illness that has become a matter of life and death for many."
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THE Taoiseach should ignore the advice of the Garda Commissioner about gardaí using their discretion as to the speed at which they drive Ministers, Mr Michael Finucane (FG) said. Mr Ahern should instruct his Ministers that they were to travel within the normal speed limits that applied to everyone else.
Mr Finucane said he thought that a very bad example had been set by the commissioner's approach that the issue of speed be left to the discretion of garda drivers.
Six thousand motorists had received penalty points since the introduction of the new scheme. In addition, the insurance industry was responding positively to the change.