David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to come back on this point because it is important. The health service is different. We get a large number of staff through international recruitment. There is a world shortage of healthcare staff. When we visited Altnagelvin, people spoke about the NHS coming in to poach a lot of staff who are trained there. We hear the same from training colleges in this State. We are losing some healthcare professionals to emigration. Some of this is because they want to experience different countries. There is no doubt we need more healthcare professionals. Whatever about what we should do when we reach our ceiling, I am in favour of having a job guarantee for all of those coming through. Perhaps this would not be in every role but certainly in key areas in primary care and community care where we have deficits. We should be taking all of the graduates into the public system. The alternative is that they go to the private hospitals or emigrate. This is the reality.

The Minister is selling a good news story and I am accepting as good news story that the net increase on average each and every year for the past three years was somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 depending on the year.