Dr. John D. Woods:

On the subject of the Chairman's question on the EMA, it is certainly clear that having the EMA in London has been positive for the UK pharmaceutical industry and for medical research in the UK. It is clear it will leave. If it comes to Dublin, we would view that positively from the point of view of Northern Ireland because, as was outlined earlier, there are very significant collaborations in terms of medical research between universities, North and South, and anything that would benefit that would be of benefit to us all.

When I talked about the four tenths of doctors who would eventually leave the UK, those are European graduates. European graduates make up 8% of the medical workforce overall in the United Kingdom but of those, just under half have said that they would potentially leave. The first problem for them is insecurity, for instance, as to whether they will even be entitled to residency. That is why one of our asks was for them to be given guaranteed residency in the UK. I suspect another problem is that many of those are doctors in training who are gaining UK postgraduate qualifications which, until now, have currency throughout Europe. If those postgraduate qualifications were no longer recognised, for instance, by the Greek medical council, I would foresee it would be less attractive to them.

The Chairman was quite right about the issue of innovative new drugs. I see this as a problem for us rather than for Ireland because Ireland will still be in the European medicines regulatory framework. However, we will be stepping outside of that. We will be a small market then. I would anticipate that major pharmaceutical companies will be much less likely to go through the rigorous process early of licensing their new drugs. For us in the UK, it will mean that we will gain access to new innovative treatments later than we would at present. It is a problem for us rather than for Ireland.

Senator Mulherin talked about doctors leaving Ireland being attracted to the UK. We see the problems being the reverse. We are concerned that lots of Irish graduates who are working in the UK currently will come back to Ireland and will not want to work in the UK. As I stated, doctors who graduated in another EU country contribute 8% of our workforce in medicine overall and we desperately cannot do without them. In some specialties, particularly surgical specialties such as obstetrics and ophthalmology, 15% of the doctors are graduates from other European countries, including Irish graduates, and we cannot fill those positions currently without those doctors.