Dr. Eamon Croke:

Yes. The advantage of getting out of one'salma mater cannot be exaggerated on occasion. The dental school in Dublin, however, has postgraduate courses that would consistently qualify for specialty if they were recognised. Some of them are undertaken based on being able to keep staff in the school. Oral medicine is an area that has a small number of people going through, but people have been brought through that course and trained, having gone through their dentistry and medical studies to start with. There are courses in oral surgery, periodontics, prosthodontics, orthodontics, paediatric dentistry and various others. I could be committing an injustice by forgetting some of the courses. There are, therefore, quite a number of postgraduate courses in Dublin and perhaps a lesser number in Cork. Again, this issue comes back to capacity. As we chatted about before, it is necessary to have chairs for people to sit on. It is not possible to put people around a bed in dental studies. It is necessary to have the required infrastructure in place. There must be the chair, the auxiliary supports and teaching facilities as well. The study of dentistry, then, has a limitation through infrastructure.