A senior official with the Health Service Executive (HSE) said today it was very difficult to predict if the Government's target of reducing the national suicide rate by 20 per cent by the year 2012 can be achieved.
Dr Patrick Doorley, national director of population health with the HSE, told the Oireachtas subcommittee on suicide that "target setting is a very very inexact science" and to some extent it was "guesswork" but the HSE was working with other groups to try and achieve it.
If the target could be achieved was "very very difficult to say", he added.
Geoff Day, director of the HSE's National Office for Suicide Prevention, told the committee the targets could only be achieved by collective action. It was "everyone's problem", he said.
The committee heard the official numbers of deaths by suicide recorded in the State in recent years hover at just under 500 a year but that rates could be higher if deaths in some road crashes which are believed to be suicides are taken into account.
It also heard Ireland has the fifth highest rate for youth suicide in the EU.
Committee chairman and Fine Gael TD Dan Neville put it to the HSE that the only progress which had been made in implementing recommendations from an Oireachtas committee report on suicide published in mid-2006 were "discussions" around what should happen and the setting up of subgroups to look at them but there had been no real action.
Mr Day said in response however that a signification number of actions had been initiated. There had for example been improvements in the self harm response through hospital A&E departments and the HSE was working on a number of specific projects related to the use of new technology like social networking web sites such as Bebo to get across messages around suicide prevention to young people.
He said suicide was only decriminalised in the State in 1993 and some of the difficulty surrounding the stigma associated with it prior to that is still with us.
Meanwhile the committee heard three of the 11 suicide resource officer posts around the country are vacant and have been for some time. Fianna Fáil Sen Mary While said these posts cover Cavan, Monaghan, Louth, Meath, Wicklow and parts of Dublin.
Dr Doorley said the HSE was working to fill one of these posts but made no commitment in relation to the filling of the other two. "Recruitment is difficult in the HSE at the moment, even for clinical staff," he said.