Mr. Fintan Hourihan:

It requires political will. We know there are approximately 3,500 dentists on the Dental Council register. The Department of Health would say that some 2,600 are in active practice, which means nearly 1,000 dentists who are on the register are not in active practice. Some of them may be overseas, some may be retired and some may have been students who graduated from here, registered here and went away again. It is a very competitive labour market.

The political will has to be there and a clear signal has to go out that in the case of children, for example, there is a public dental service that the HSE and the Department are committed to restoring and rebuilding. It is very difficult to recruit dentists into the service when, on the one hand, we hear the Minister saying he is going to ask the private dentists to see the children, when that is a large part of what the public service does. That confusion, assuming it is confusion, has to be addressed. There needs to be a clear statement from the Minister that he and the Government are committed to the HSE public dental service. There has to be a decision to hire more dentists but also to end this crazy situation where you might be given permission to hire a dentist but you cannot get permission to hire a dental nurse, which means you cannot see any patients because, for chaperone and other reasons, dentists cannot see patients on their own.

There is a whole range of confidence-building measures and foundation stepping stones that we have set out in our document. There are many facets to it and we have covered a lot of it here today. If we think of vulnerable adults, the priority has to be to start talking about a new scheme to replace the DTSS as a priority. For children, it is to restore the school screening service, give a clear political commitment as to the future of the service, remove the anomalies in the recruitment embargo and start hiring more staff.

I was asked earlier if there is any reason other than a shortage of dentists that so few children are being seen. It was deemed a good idea 30 years ago and it was an excellent idea. All that has changed is that there are not enough dentists, and the reason there are not enough dentists is because the HSE is choosing to hire elsewhere. It is very striking that the number of doctors, nurses and other health professionals and administrators are all going up by 20% to 50% and the only profession where the number is going down is dentistry. That is hardly an accident. There needs to be a direction from the Minister to say that we value the public dental service, we value the screening service for children, we want to get back to screening children at three different age intervals at primary school, and this is what we are going to do to make sure we have the staff to see the children.

Of course, there are competing pressures. Private dentists want to hire staff as well, and that is the reality.

There will be more students coming on stream from the new RCSI school in Dublin and, we hope, from the school in Cork as well. They are obviously going to be longer term. The immediate issues around capacity relate to work permits and visas, for example, and that is something the Department of Justice and the Department of enterprise can help us with.