Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

-----and we have to do something about that.

On the fees front, I will make a point about a graduate entry medicine course that I heard discussed earlier. It is one thing for the Bank of Ireland to remove the loan, but people who we need to qualify as doctors should not have to take out a loan in the amount of €15,000 per year at all. We desperately need the doctors in our health service. It is madness to force them to pay €60,000. The latter means that working class people can forget about trying to become doctors. Even for people who might have a bit of money, €60,000 is crazy. It is self-defeating to put those kinds of barriers in the way of people who want to graduate in medicine, especially when we desperately need doctors.

I could say that about other allied health professionals too, but I do not have time. We should remove those fees.

See this speech in context