Dr. Sally Ann Lynch:

With regards to why Northern Ireland has more, it is important to acknowledge that it set up a training scheme and really supported it for clinical geneticists. All the geneticists that work up there trained in Northern Ireland, because it is extremely difficult to recruit from abroad. I set up the training scheme in the Republic, but I was blocked by the Medical Practitioners Act 2007 for about seven years. We were not allowed set up anything new. That has had a knock-on effect. Our training was hugely delayed. In the end, it was delayed by a decade. We are getting a new person in July to start training. However, there have been so few, it is so difficult to recruit from abroad, and there is an ageing consultant workforce, so it is currently a critical issue.