Cross-partisan support as Derry MLAs slam CCIS closure amid growing mental health crisis

Local politicians acknowledged the North’s ‘growing mental health crisis’ and expressed regret at the recent closure of Extern’s CCIS service due to a lack of funding.

SDLP MLA Mark H. Durkan, who proposed the motion, said: “Suicide prevention and saving lives should unite us all, however, and it does. It united us five years ago, when we all stood here making the same argument to fund the critical CCIS in Derry, an area with a shamefully high suicide rate.

"It is shameful that we have a fight on our hands once more to reinstate a service that literally saved lives but that was forced to close a couple of months ago when funding from the mental health support fund ended.”

Mr. Durkan pointed out that the since it was established in 2018 the CCIS provided more than 3,400 crisis interventions.

Many of these, he said, took place out of hours, ‘the very hours when people are at their most vulnerable, at their darkest and alone with their thoughts’.

"The closure of the community crisis intervention service alongside the defunding of other vital supports in Derry — removal of the Northlands Addiction Treatment Centre's core funding and defunding of Men's Action Network — have left a dangerous void in the community, which is already struggling under immense pressure,” said the SDLP MLA.

Sinn Féin’s Ciara Ferguson said the CCIS had provided vital support in Derry up until its closure last month.

“We all know the devastating statistics. We know that mental health exists on a complex continuum, so any adequate response should mean that those vital services are sustained and bolstered further by additional work across all our Departments.

"At any one time, individual and family relationships, community and structural inequalities can all interact to either protect or undermine a person's mental health and well-being.

"The more exposed that you are to adverse experiences and circumstances, the more challenging that it is to maintain resilience and bounce back from hardship,” she said.

DUP MLA Gary Middleton said the service closed because ‘the temporary funding model was piecemeal’.

"Someone needed to say, ‘We will make this work. We will make this a priority’. In a system that talks endlessly about tackling the mental health crisis, the shutters came down. When all of us say that we care about mental health, what does that mean in practice?

"If it means warm words every few months in the Chamber but cold shoulders when allocating Health budgets, we are not being honest with the public. If it means leaving the community and voluntary sector to beg for survival, year in, year out, we are just adding to the deflation already felt in that sector,” said Mr. Middleton.

Pádraig Delargy, of Sinn Fein, said the motion was ‘particularly pertinent to Derry because, as has been mentioned, in the past year, funding has been cut for Northlands, and the Men's Action Network has closed’.

"The recent closure of Extern's service in Foyle is just another example of the many services being cut. It is particularly pertinent in our area because people are being discriminated against because of not just their mental health needs but their postcode. That is not good enough.

"What solution to that is the Department of Health coming up with? Are people going to sit in A&E?” he asked.

Health Minister Mike Nesbitt said the CCIS had received funding from various sources over the past seven years.

“Funding for the CCIS, as one Member pointed out, was initially provided by Derry City and Strabane District Council as a pilot from 2018 to 2021. The Health and Social Care Board provided £27,000 of support in 2020. Subsequently, my Department provided some funding to allow the project to continue.

“From autumn 2021 until March of this year, Extern received £504,989 from the mental health support fund via the Community Foundation.

"That money came out of a one-off, three-year scheme to support mental health organisations that was funded using unspent COVID-19 funds.

"Given the well-documented position of my Department's budget, with all the resources having been allocated, the scheme has now ended. My Department identified a further £42,300 of non-recurrent funding to allow for an extension until June of this year, but, unfortunately, given our ongoing extreme budget challenges, no further funds could be found,” he said.

The minister rejected claims that funding had been cut by the Department of Health.

"Via Extern, the CCIS applied to the core grant scheme for the 2025-26 funding round but was not successful. I will address that, because two Members said that the Department withdrew funding, as if it were a deliberate act.

"It is inaccurate and unfair to suggest that it was a deliberate act. I looked at the core grant scheme when I was appointed Minister, and it was frozen. I wanted to bring the scheme back into operation, but I also wanted to review it, because its application process had not changed in over 20 years, meaning that no charity set up in the past 20 years could apply to the old scheme.

"We worked with the NI Council for Voluntary Action (NICVA), which facilitated workshops at which the community and voluntary sector told us how the core grant scheme should be redesigned.

"It is an unfortunate fact that, when it applied, Northlands was unsuccessful. We did not withdraw funds from Northlands or the CCIS. Rather, their applications were simply unsuccessful,” he said.

But Alliance MLA Danny Donnelly pointed to the decrease in the core grant scheme.

"The core grant scheme had funding of £3.6m a year when it was set up, but that was then halved to £18m a year. Many groups and services that deliver vital services across NI therefore lost the ability to continue to do their work,” he noted.