Mr. Mark Smyth:

Hundreds of undergraduate psychology graduates come through. Not all of them want to enter psychology. Some wish to go into research or other branches of psychology. The bottleneck starts at the assistant psychologist level. To be fair, the HSE did formalise the grade of assistant psychologist early last year at 114 places. There is room to increase that number. We mentioned that. We also noted that there is room to increase capacity for assistant psychologists in NEPS services because there is none at the moment. Even if we increase the number of assistant psychologists, the bottleneck at professional training programmes will remain. The Government did that in 2000 and there is room to do so again but it needs the political will to make it happen.