SECOND OPINION Paudge ConnollyThe trouble with suicide is that we don't see it. By my calculations, there are on average 10 a week, but we don't have ready-to-hand national statistics.
When I pick up my newspaper on a Monday morning, I can see there have been heavy casualties on the roads in my constituency of Cavan-Monaghan, or wherever.
I know that the Garda superintendent in charge will endeavour to do something about it. There will be warnings to motorists, media campaigns, road blocks. High visibility measures are taken swiftly to combat the carnage.
Yet the quiet attrition of suicide claims more lives than roads do, year on year.
The victims are often young men, yet there is no public demand for action.
Nobody marches into the Health Service Executive or the health boards, brandishing cameras, microphones and clipboards demanding action. And to make things worse, there are grounds for believing that some road deaths are suicides or self-harm incidents.
Next time you pick up a newspaper and read about road accidents and see photographs of mangled cars, and smiling young people whose lives have been cruelly ended, imagine you are looking at the recent crop of suicides.
For good reason, the media hide the uncomfortable truth.
To spare the anguish of those left behind, most suicides go unreported. Suicide of a loved one is a desperate burden for the survivors to carry, so we - the media and the rest of society - look the other way.
In doing so, we are concealing the scale of the problem from ourselves.
I'm not saying that we should publish names and photographs of every suicide.
But if we choose not to recognise the problem that way, we must come up with another strategy to deal with the horrible truth of those lonely wasted lives, and the pain of those left behind.
For a start, we need weekly or monthly reporting of suicide statistics with victims' anonymity protected.
Such weekly figures will galvanise health authorities to move with the urgency needed.
A German project has achieved a remarkable degree of success in reducing suicides. It is now being been piloted in Cork and Kerry, and could profitably be extended nationwide, rather than in two years when another 1,000 people have died.
The German project has four dimensions: educating GPs in the signs and symptoms of suicide; targeting resources at self-harm cases; specific training for key professionals - social workers, Garda, teachers, journalists and religious; and strong public awareness campaigns in visual and print media.
In Nuremberg the project resulted in a 26 per cent reduction in self-harm which frequently leads to suicide, compared with a 24 per cent increase in self-harm in Wurzburg, where it wasn't introduced
I've worked for 30 years as a psychiatric nurse. I've seen enough to know that for many the appointment with a consultant is light years away from any kind of solution.
The person in pain could be your classmate who is a bit withdrawn, the workmate whose face never quite fits, the fellow who turns up in the doctor's surgery with non-specific ailments, the stressed-out young mother at the clinic, or the rural bachelor who becomes more and more isolated.
The busy casualty nurse may not have time to notice that this is the third time that so-and-so is back again to be patched up, and the injuries could be self-inflicted.
Too many warning signs get ignored, the suffering suffer, their pain is invisible.
So we must train ourselves to spot the warning signs.
I suggested in the Dáil recently that a simple suicide prevention leaflet be given to all healthcare staff, from GPs' secretaries to hospital porters right through to senior medical staff. That's just a start.
I have also called for an overall national suicide audit. An audit would provide monthly totals, establish if people sought professional help, sought support of friends and determine the issues involved.
I expect that common themes or clusters of themes will emerge - financial or marital worries, lack of self-esteem, exam pressures and so on.
The strategies to tackle the root causes will then become clearer.
Right now we don't know enough about what is going on, either at national level or local level. We are losing vulnerable young people and we don't know why.
We can save lives, but all we do is offer the bereaved relatives tea and sympathy. It isn't enough, and I welcome the interest and increased political awareness across all parties that we must do something.
Paudge Connolly is an independent TD for Cavan-Monaghan.