Mr. Fintan Hourihan:

Yes, it is solely down to capacity. There has not been any change in policy. There simply are not enough dentists to visit the children in schools. As I said earlier, going back to 1994, there was a commitment that children would be seen in intervals, in three different classes in primary school. The experience is that now many are not seen in second class or fourth class; they are only seen in sixth class, although in some pockets of the country they are seen more than once. We looked at the number of pupils based on Department of Education data and information provided through parliamentary questions on the numbers who have been screened. To reiterate the point, some of the 104,000 are children who were seen at second level. Therefore, the number of children who did not receive screening in primary school last year is considerably greater than 100,000.