Land adjacent to psychiatric hospitals across the State has been sold at below cost or simply given away at a time when funding is badly needed to improve mental health services, a report out today claims.
The report from the Irish Psychiatric Association (IPA), The Lie of the Land, lists several instances in which this is alleged to have happened.
It claims Wicklow County Council was given two acres of land belonging to Wicklow mental health services "at no recompense" and that 20 acres of land around St Conal's Hospital in Donegal also have to be given over to the county council for social and affordable housing.
In addition it says a 16.5-acre section of lands around St Loman's Hospital in Mullingar was sold to Westmeath County Council last year for €3.5 million and the money went into "central HSE funds" rather than being ring-fenced for mental health services.
Just before last year's general election two acres of a 40-acre site at St Fintan's Hospital in Portlaoise were handed over to the OPW for the building of a new Garda station in the town and it was unclear how much money changed hands for it. The OPW said it would have paid "a mutually agreed price" but it is not clear if the land would have reached more on the open market. The report says a site at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, earmarked for an acute psychiatric unit so services could be discontinued at the outdated St Ita's Hospital in Portrane, was now being handed over for a private co-located hospital, even though years had been spent planning the psychiatric unit at Beaumont.
In other instances, lands have been taken over to accommodate HSE administrative staff, it says.
The report comes out on the second anniversary of the publication of the national mental health policy, A Vision for Change.
Under it, mental hospitals across the State were to be closed and sold over a 10-year period and the funds they generated used to improve mental health services in the community.
Dr Siobhán Barry of the IPA said things were now worse than when it was published.
Services were "on the verge of collapse" for certain critical patient groups, and their modernisation was in considerable jeopardy.
Unless the dissipation of mental health sector assets in the way outlined in the IPA report was discontinued the implementation of A Vision for Change could be delayed or scuppered altogether.
"The trend apparent to the authors suggests that psychiatric services represent an easy target by planners and managers to appropriate assets to meet shortfalls in current and capital expenditures of general health services."
Dr Barry added: "The political system is clearly complicit in this process, either directly or more often by silence and indifference."