Dr. Alan Wall:

The Deputy is right. I take on board what he says. Yes, the University of Limerick graduate entry medicine programme is very successful and is done very well. The Deputy is right that it takes in a broad range of students from all kinds of backgrounds, as those medical courses do. It is a very useful thing. If the Deputy will forgive me for this, I will talk in generalities a bit because I must. One thing to note is that when we went out to the system looking for a response in the case of veterinary medicine, we were not prescriptive at all and nobody came back with a graduate offer, so we are working very much with what we get.

The issue of entry is a complex one, as the committee will know, and some areas can lend themselves more easily to this than others, but the system, just looking at third-level education, is open to and uses numerous routes into degrees, as the committee will be aware. We are not particularly blind to that. The specifics around agriculture as a way in will be in the hands of the university. There is another provider. There will be a dialogue about how we manage this. I am loath to give any sense to the committee that somehow we will dismantle the points system, because that is a bigger issue. As I said, one would have to be objectively a fan of what it has done, although it is unfair on the margins to some students who can do well and actually later find other routes in. I accept all that, but I do not think that somehow we will use veterinary medicine as a way of solving that bigger issue.