Willie O'Dea (Limerick East, Fianna Fail)

I note Deputy Wall's remarks on the huge amount of organisation and effort that has gone into putting this mission together and I thank him for them. I will convey his sentiments to the Chief of Staff.

Regarding family concerns, access to families, parcels and so on, I have already undertaken, in reply to a number of questions from Deputy Deenihan, to do what I can to provide assistance. This is a challenging mission and I appreciate the worries of families. I have spoken to many of them and wish to do everything I can to make things as easy as possible for them.

Deputy Wall raised a valid point on the qualifications of medical personnel recruited recently. As was said in reply to an earlier question, we found it increasingly difficult to recruit doctors here and we will come back to this matter in a later question. We even found it increasingly difficult to recruit doctors in mainland Europe so we have been forced to look further afield. As far as I know six of the 22 doctors we currently employ are foreign nationals, though I think one has taken Irish citizenship. The Deputy is correct that until recently there were difficulties recruiting doctors. An individual was found to have forged qualifications. In another case a female doctor from Nigeria, who was perfectly qualified and, I am told, an excellent doctor, had a number of criminal convictions in other countries for tax evasion and other offences. We did not know about this and since those incidents the checking procedure has been considerably tightened.

The Army has its own way of choosing interpreters and I will get the Deputy the relevant details. I am informed that the military is very happy with the interpreters it has and this was illustrated last Sunday in the meeting the Deputy referred to where the two interpreters interacted very well.

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