Dr. Alan Wall:

I suppose there are a couple of things I could say. First, within the European Union, students are free to do that. It is probably a good thing, and they do come back. We are seeing that. We see it in the veterinary register that students take the opportunity to be educated abroad and come back and work here. It is the European Union working in a good way.

It is easy, as the Deputy will be aware, to have a go at the points system and high points, but actually it is a very good system from a number of viewpoints. I accept, as the Deputy says, that there are students who go to other places which require fewer points but, to be clear, the HEA does not distinguish between the provision it has across 17 institutions. They are all of a high class. We do not make that distinction.

I will not help the Deputy by condemning the points system because the points system, taken in the broadest sense, is one of the ways in which we can do it. We use the health professions admissions test, HPAT, for medicine, for instance. That kind of thing can be used. UCD has introduced a portfolio. There are other ways of doing things.

The issue about the points is also about the number of places available, as the Deputy will be aware. I suppose what caused us to go out to the system was that we knew there were 82 places and two thirds of the register in the past five years are Irish students, mostly, who have gone to Poland or Bucharest, and we wanted to know whether there was an issue there for us, and that is what we did.