Dr. Peadar Gilligan:

On the global shortage, absolutely it is a huge challenge. Regarding recruiting doctors from abroad to work here, Ireland is an outlier. We are hugely dependent on doctors who trained in other countries to provide our health service. Paradoxically, we have more medical students in training per capita than most other countries in the world, apart from Cuba. We are training a lot of doctors and I think we should be proud of that fact. The challenge is that many of those doctors are leaving the system and, as a result, we require doctors who have trained elsewhere to come here and provide service. As Professor Sadlier said, many of them will increase their training and expertise and then return to their own countries, but many of them do wish to stay in Ireland and we do not make that as straightforward for them as we should. We should be incredibly grateful that they come here and provide care to a very high standard.