Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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I ask why we are not bringing more medical students into the system and why junior doctors cannot be given a two-year rather than a one-year stint in the hospitals. Mr. O'Brien said in his concluding remarks that doctors need certainty but I can assure him that they do not have certainty. As Senator Colm Burke said, they are doing interviews every six months. I cannot think of any other professionals who are doing interviews every six months and who are wondering whether they will be based in Donegal, Cork or elsewhere. I do not know what is wrong with our Irish doctors that they cannot be employed in the system. We are bringing in non-Irish, foreign doctors and I would ask the public if that is what we want into the future. I do not see the situation improving.

Do we want non-Irish junior doctors and non-Irish consultants in this country? If we do, that is fine but if we do not, Mr. O'Brien and his colleagues need to sort out the problem for our doctors. I hear Mr. O'Brien sighing but I know of a number of doctors who agree fully with what I am saying. What is Mr. O'Brien doing to incentivise junior doctors to stay in this country? They are intelligent, bright people who are working in life-and-death situations for long hours. They are ambitious and they work hard. They go to medical school for six or seven years, work in our health system for ten years as non-consultant hospital doctors but then we do not employ them as consultants or we want to pay them peanuts. Nobody has said that here today but we know that is why so many of them are going abroad. We need to talk about this realistically. If we are happy to have non-Irish doctors in our hospitals and non-Irish consultants, that is fine. That is certainly the direction in which we seem to be going.