Dr. Tadhg Crowley:

Apologies, finally my sound is restored from Kilkenny. I thank Deputy Durkan for his comments. Unfortunately, there is no quick fix. There is no state whereby we can magically look abroad and bring doctors in quickly from abroad; it is not going to happen. A problem at the moment is that our GPs have been trained, and the training they get here through the college is fantastic, and then they are well sought after across the world. It has been happening for years that they go course, get experience, and come back. Now our problem is that they are not coming back. We are also not getting doctors from abroad coming in, so there is no quick fix. Training more people sounds great but we must be realistic that we are also competing against other medical professionals here for their training schemes. We must train our GPs to a certain level so when they go out they are able to actually provide the service for which we are training them. General practice is a specialty. One does not just train quickly up to it.