Mairéad Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister. I am not harassing the poor souls who write responses to parliamentary questions but I am a little bit confused. I submitted a parliamentary question on this issue because I am confused about the current approach.

The response to a parliamentary question I received from the Department stated: "The State contribution was €11,950 per student with the balance of fees payable by the student." Different colleges have different fees. In UCD, for example, students pay fees of just under €17,000. Taking what the Minister has told me and what was stated in the parliamentary question to which I refer, surely the balance should be €5,000. That is clearly not how the system works because that is not what is happening. When it was first introduced, the purpose of graduate entry medicine was to open up the discipline to those people who would not traditionally have had the ability to study medicine. We also need more doctors to be trained.

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