Mr. Ian Fleming:

From a statistical perspective, we were aware that there were issues because of the number of advertisements in the Veterinary Ireland Journaland online. There was a huge number of advertisements and they tended to be dragging on. The reality of that came home to bite me about two years ago when we placed an advertisement for a replacement for me to do night and weekend work because I have reached that stage of my career. It took us 15 months to find a vet who was willing to step in and do the job and that probably would be considered a short enough time to wait for a response. Getting vets to fill positions is a huge issue.

As we went along, we got some figures on new registrants from the Veterinary Council of Ireland, VCI. This is shown on the column chart on the members' brief. It indicates the number of new registrants going on the register year on year from 2001 to 2022. I will not bore the committee with the details except to say that within those statistics lie the real issues we face. Last year, we got 80 graduates on the register from a course in UCD that produces 82 graduates a year, on average. Some of those will have gone away, to come back again, and that is the way it works. The average is between 70 and 80 annually. The middle, green section of the chart shows the Irish people who have gone abroad. As Senator Lombard pointed out, there are about 600 Irish-trained vets abroad, so that is 120 per year, for five years. From the statistics, we know that about 60 return every year. We are getting roughly half of them or maybe slightly over half, because there may be a fallout of a few from over there. However, generally speaking, they do not. I have a qualified man from Tullamore, who has been staying with me for the past couple of months. He studied in Warsaw and he has been filling me in on what has been going on in Warsaw in the last while. We are aware of the issue of the brain drain. We are losing half the number of Irish students who go abroad because they never return to the country. This is based on averages over a period of years.

The top portion of the chart shows the foreign nationals who were educated abroad who come in to make up the shortfall. Despite these people coming in, we still have a shortfall. There are still up to 90 advertisements for positions in the veterinary magazine every month, because that is the reality on the ground. We still have guys in remote areas who cannot find somebody and people with small animal practices who are struggling to get a replacement or to expand their practices for the same reason.

Regarding the age profile, we got some figures from the VCI, about the ageing programme. I did a bit of a search into that and we see in those Munster areas, in particular, the increasing age profile. To go back a little bit, in 2008, the predecessor of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, CCPC, produced a report on different professions in the country. Regarding veterinary practitioners, the report highlighted a couple of issues and one of them was an ageing profile. The commission raised a red flag on the basis that 14% of vets on the register were over 55 years of age. Now, on average 18% of vets on the register are over 60 years of age. I then took the averages from the counties and found that the Munster area was generally well above the average, at 21% or 22% of vets over 60 years of age.

In Tipperary's case, it was 23%. It is a significant issue, which was brought home to me by a colleague working in a town in Kerry who told me that, of the five individual practices in his town, one of the vets was in his 80s, two were in their 70s, one was in his 60s and there was a young fellow in his 50s. This can affect our food industry. With such a vulnerability, if one of those vets gets a heart attack or becomes otherwise ill, we do not know whether that vet will be replaced. There seems to be a dearth of potential replacements. A new school in Ireland would be vital. We gathered the figures for Limerick and Cork counties. When I then rang the practices in the cities of Cork and Limerick to get their age profiles, what I discovered was that the percentages matched those in Kerry and Tipperary. In other words, approximately 22% of the practising professionals in those large counties – they are the counties dealing with the huge dairy industry – are in their 60s or over.

These are the age issues, but I will pass over to my colleagues to deal with the Senator's other questions.