Brendan Ryan (Labour)

If I were rewriting my speech, I would be quite happy to take the Minister of State's script, since he made the case that there is a profession called "physical therapy" and admits that the Department of Health and Children does not understand it. He says that five or six months after Committee Stage, it has not replied to requests from his Department for further information. It has a title that, in many other countries, means the same as "physiotherapy" and is, at the very least, capable of being confused with it, yet he proposes not to regulate it.

I must be careful here. If a profession is left unregulated it saves it a great deal of money. There is confusion in the public mind and, in addition, the profession or group is not subject to the same degree of quality assurance as physiotherapists. I will not say a bad word about the profession of physical therapy. However, if it was requested to supply information by the Department of Health and Children six months ago and have not yet done so, that raises a question mark about the quality of the professional body in question. During that time, it found time to lobby every Member of this House intensively about the profession, yet it did not find the time to answer questions posed by the responsible Department. This raises questions that public well-being demands should be answered.

The solution, of course, to reassure the public and perhaps focus the minds of those responsible for physical therapy, would be to accept Senator Browne's amendment rather than my own, which would state that the definition of both "physical therapy" and "physiotherapy" should essentially be that which currently applies to the latter. Those who are physical therapists should be allowed to focus on the fact that they have left the Government and politicians confused about the precise details of their profession.

Senator Henry regularly raises an extremely important matter in this debate that seems to have gone over the head of the Minister of State, since he has not mentioned it, namely, the Bologna process of standardising qualifications across the entire European Union. Although it is legal, we cannot in practical terms go off at a tangent that defies usage in other countries. That is the second argument for standardisation. The solution is to accept Senator Browne's amendment and invite the independent representative body for physical therapists, if there is one, to clarify its position and attempt to find an agreed solution, which might, as Senator O'Toole said, involve physical therapy, with a name not liable to be confused with physiotherapy, being recognised as a separate profession and protected as such. However, I remain unconvinced by the arguments of the Minister of State and the physical therapists. The solution is to accept that they are so similar in title internationally as to be identical.