Every family that has waited months for a CAMHS appointment knows the frustration. What most don't know is how much has quietly been poured into the service over the last two budgets. New teams, new beds, a digital front door and a record overall mental health budget are now working their way into local services across the country.
Record funding for youth mental health
Mental health funding in Ireland reached nearly €1.6 billion in 2026, according to Minister of State Mary Butler, who told the Dáil in March 2026 that funding has risen by over 51% since she took office. CAMHS itself now receives approximately €191 million a year, up almost 40% over four years, with a further €127 million going to NGOs supporting young people, including Jigsaw and SpunOut, organisations that many young people encounter well before they ever reach a specialist clinical service.
Budget 2026 added €10 million specifically for youth and early intervention services, funding a new crisis response pathway for children and young people, two new early intervention Jigsaw services, and continued development of a digital single point of access for youth mental health, Minister Butler confirmed in the Dáil in June 2026.
That €10 million sits on top of years of steady increases rather than arriving as a one-off boost, which is part of why CAMHS-specific funding has grown by almost 40% over four years even as the wider mental health budget has grown by more than half since Minister Butler took office, she told the Dáil in June 2026. For a service that spent much of the last decade being criticised for under-investment, that scale of sustained increase is a genuinely different pattern.
A separate, earlier Budget 2026 announcement in October 2025 detailed €10 million for eight new specialist community mental health teams and €6.8 million to open 31 additional inpatient beds across the system, covering areas such as dual diagnosis, early intervention in psychosis, eating disorders and services for older people, alongside CAMHS-specific measures.
Taken together, these announcements show funding arriving through more than one channel in the same budget cycle: general adult and specialist mental health investment in October 2025, followed by youth-specific measures confirmed through the year. That's one reason the picture for families can look confusing even though the underlying trend is clearly upward. NGOs remain a significant part of that picture too, with the €127 million channelled to youth-focused organisations like Jigsaw and SpunOut used to fund early, lower-threshold support that keeps some young people out of the specialist CAMHS system altogether.
New CAMHS teams and beds coming on stream
For CAMHS directly, Budget 2026 funded an additional specialist eating disorders team, two new Mental Health of Intellectual Disability teams for children, and five new Discovery Colleges, peer-support learning programmes for young people, according to Dáil statements from Minister Butler in June and July 2026.
Discovery College is a peer-led model where young people learn alongside trained facilitators, some of whom have lived experience of mental health difficulties themselves, rather than sitting through a traditional clinical appointment. Rolling out five more of these programmes nationally is a small but telling sign that CAMHS investment in 2026 isn't only about clinical staff and beds, but also about lighter-touch supports that can catch young people before they need acute care.
On bed capacity, the October 2025 Budget 2026 announcement confirmed the reopening of 11 CAMHS inpatient beds at Linn Dara in Dublin and 10 new beds at the National Children's Hospital. Minister Butler told the Dáil in June 2026 that an additional 18 CAMHS acute inpatient beds have been funded in total, alongside a new CAMHS Emergency Liaison Service and expanded CAMHS Hubs designed to improve crisis cover, funded through an earlier €2.9 million allocation under Budget 2025.
Specialist intellectual disability services, an area long flagged as under-resourced, are also being built up. New CAMHS Mental Health of Intellectual Disability teams for children have been funded in successive budgets, and the Minister of State says she remains committed to phased roll-out of the model of care she launched for this group in 2022, per her comments to the Dáil in July 2026.
That model of care matters because children with an intellectual disability and a co-occurring mental health difficulty have historically fallen between services, sometimes told they don't fit either general disability supports or mainstream CAMHS. Building dedicated CAMHS-ID teams gives this group a clearer, named route into specialist care rather than relying on ad hoc arrangements between services never designed to work together.
Tackling the waiting list directly
Demand for CAMHS keeps growing, with over 230,000 appointments delivered in the past year, 8% more than in 2024, and more than 29,000 referrals received in 2025, according to a Minister of State's written Dáil answer in May 2026. Around 2% of the population needs this specialist secondary care service, with over 90% of mental health needs met successfully in primary care, the same answer notes.
The waiting list remains the toughest number in the whole picture. Figures released to Sinn Féin's Sorca Clarke TD in August 2026 showed 4,881 young people waiting nationally for a CAMHS appointment, including 643 waiting more than 12 months and a further 446 waiting between nine and twelve months, with the total having risen since the Government took office in January 2025. That's the clearest sign that investment and demand are still racing each other, and exactly why Minister Butler has described tackling waiting times as an ongoing job rather than a finished one.
In response, CAMHS has launched what the Department describes as a targeted campaign to reduce waiting lists across all teams, referenced by Minister Butler in March 2026 Dáil statements. The service is also developing a new Single Point of Access, meant to give young people and families an easier route into the right level of care rather than one narrow gateway.
There's a regional dimension too, one the new investment is trying to address directly. The August 2026 figures showed marked variation between areas, with 208 young people waiting more than a year in Cork South and West and 165 in Louth and Meath, part of the reasoning behind funding new specialist teams and beds in specific areas rather than spreading resources evenly regardless of local pressure. The HSE now also publishes county-level waiting list breakdowns in response to parliamentary questions, giving TDs and families a clearer local picture than was available even a year or two ago.
Ministerial engagement has stepped up too: Minister Butler visited 21 CAMHS teams nationwide over the past year to meet regional executive officers directly, part of an effort to track local performance and address delays team by team, she told the Dáil in June 2026. All of this sits within the CAMHS Operational Guideline 2025, the service's newly updated national framework for how referrals are assessed and prioritised, published in December 2025.
The Bottom Line
CAMHS still faces real demand pressure, and no one is pretending every family gets seen as quickly as they'd like. But the scale of investment landing in 2025 and 2026, record overall mental health funding, new specialist teams for eating disorders and intellectual disability, reopened and new inpatient beds, a dedicated crisis pathway, and a national push on waiting lists, shows a service being actively rebuilt rather than left to cope alone. With ministers now visiting individual CAMHS teams and county-level waiting list data published in response to Dáil questions, families and public representatives have more visibility into local performance than they did even two years ago. The real test now is whether that investment keeps turning into shorter waits for the families who need it most.
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