Mr. Fintan Hourihan:

We would see that the current shortfall is possibly of the order of 500 dentists. There is no way the dental schools are going to be able to supply even half of those numbers. As I said earlier, the one area that could be addressed pretty quickly is that, if the dental schools were properly funded, they would no longer have to seek to bring in dentists from outside the European Economic Area, EEA, who are paying the full economic cost of dental education.