A national suicide prevention service is being drawn up by RehabCare to help address the alarming level of suicide among young people.
The suicide prevention programme is being developed to help address the "national crisis" of suicide, which is now the biggest cause of death among young people in the 15-24 age group.
The service, which will cost up to €3 million a year to operate, will involve the training of people working with young people to provide targeted support to those at risk.
Former US president Bill Clinton is due to arrive in Ireland next month where he will formally back plans for the service at a fundraising dinner.
Former SDLP MP John Hume, who launched the fundraising drive yesterday, said there was an urgent need for a prevention service to address the "devastating problem" of suicide.
"More people die by suicide than are killed on our roads. Yet there is still a greater awareness of the loss of life on our roads, and significantly less understanding of the extent of suicide and parasuicide," he said.
"Perhaps it is only through awareness of the extent of road deaths each year that we can perhaps put into context the problem of an even larger number of people who die by suicide each year."
The prevention service will be drawn up in consultation with voluntary groups and State agencies, according to the chief executive of RehabCare, Angela Kerins.
She said one of the problems with work in the area of suicide prevention was the fragmentation of services. She hoped the new service could help to draw these together and develop successful programmes that are already running.
Much of the work will focus on schools, outreach services and a training and advisory service for people working in the mental health area.
"We want to empower young people to ask for help . . . We're going to go about doing this in an open, consultative way, establishing programmes which prove beneficial to young people," she said.
One of the main sponsors of the fundraising initiative is the mobile phone company O2, which has committed itself to help fund the programme for several years.
The company's chief executive, Danuta Gray, said: "One of the biggest barriers to suicide prevention is people's inability to talk about their distress, to communicate their pain, to ask for help."
While the latest figures show that 444 people died by suicide in 2003, the number may be even greater. A further 58 people died in the same year from undetermined causes and there is a high probability that they were suicide related.
The latest figures also show that there were 11,200 cases of attempted suicide in 2003. Eighty per cent of deaths by suicide in 2003 were men.
The fundraising dinner due to be attended by Mr Clinton will be held at the Citywest Hotel on May 23rd, where the former president will deliver a keynote address.
