Colm Burke (Cork North-Central, Fine Gael)

I have two quick questions. The first is on the elective hospital in Cork. I was told by the former Minister, Stephen Donnelly, that a application permission would be made by October 2023. The design has not even been finalised. I ask for a timeline for this process?

My second question concerns the lack of co-ordination between Departments in relation to the training of key people. For example, I started the campaign to increase the number of radiation therapists going through our colleges. It took me two years to get that changed, yet we had four linear scanners lying idle around the country, one in Galway, two in Dublin and one in Cork, because we did not have radiation therapists. Now, we have a problem with dental training. We are not producing enough Irish dentists in our colleges. To give the figures from Cork, 61 dentists qualified in 2023. Of those, 36 were non-European and 25 were Irish. In Trinity College Dublin, 46 dentists qualified, of whom 25 were Irish and 21 were non-European. These are crazy figures as regards forward planning in our health service. Our population has increased by 43% and we need to plan appropriately.