Dr. Mick Molloy:

I apologise for interrupting the Senator, but there is something I forgot to mention. There is another group that is hidden and forgotten in this, and that is the group of Irish students who go to Europe to gain their medical degrees. While they get all of the technical knowledge in the various courses through the university and get a degree, they have difficulty integrating back into the system here because they have not done the Irish legal system in their medical training and they have not worked in the hospital system to understand what the processes are for managing certain types of patients here. We developed a programme with University College Dublin, UCD, to try to help to bridge these doctors back into the working system. We put a proposal to the HSE but we have not been able to get it funded. There are hundreds of Irish medical students who have already spent a period of time in Europe getting a degree and want to come here, but the UK system has developed a process for them to integrate into the UK. We are losing them to the UK when we could actually do with them here.