Professor Matthew Sadlier:

It depends on what part of Donegal we are talking about. It is obviously easier to recruit in the large urban areas than in the next classification down, which towns such as Letterkenny fall into. I am not fully up to date with those sorts of things. It is when you get to community treatment centres or primary care centres that are out in more rural areas that it is much harder to recruit. It is hard to get staff to work there. At the end of the day, the Irish healthcare service relies on the 65% of our staff who have trained abroad. We are the largest recruiter of international healthcare staff in the world. We are leading that, and it is not even close. We are approximately 20% ahead of the nearest comparator. You also have people coming from other countries, who are of different religions and want to have a community they can integrate into. With all due respect to small rural populations in Ireland, that is not feasible. They want to have their communities and live in areas where they have people they know, etc., so it is easier to recruit into those areas. These are the realities on the ground we have to take into consideration when we devise policy. Too much mental health policy is devised without considering these recruitment problems.