Mr. Fintan Hourihan:

Yes. For many years we have said that this is not about the fees it is about the structure of the scheme. The Minister introduced significant increases in the fees and expected that this would produce an increase of the number of dentists in the scheme and the number of patients treated. In fact, as we had warned him, that was not the outcome. As I have said, as an immediate consequence we have seen a small increase in the number of patients being seen, but since June 2017 there are 80,000 fewer patients being seen. It had reached a very low ebb and there has been a small bounce but an entirely new scheme is what is required. We commissioned research and we asked a health economist at Queen's University Belfast. He produced his proposals on a new way to deal with the issue. Fundamentally, dentists will state that their concerns about the scheme are the handcuffs put on them in the context of the treatments they can offer and the materials and techniques they can use. This scheme has been in place since 1994. It has not taken account of all the changes in approaches and techniques since then. There is a gap between medical card patients and all of the other patients in what can be offered by the dentists-----