John Crown (Independent)

I wish to inform the House that an important person in Irish medicine passed away this morning. Professor James Fennelly was the first medical oncologist, founder of cancer medicine in Ireland, who I am sure treated the relatives of many Members of this House. Not only was he the first but for 15 years he was the only medical oncologist in the Republic of Ireland. I could not let the occasion pass without paying a brief tribute to the memory of this fine man and to pass on my best wishes to his family.

I would also like to congratulate Mrs. Justice Susan Denham who brings to her new appointment as Chief Justice a wonderful curriculum vitae and track record. I am not being ungallant but I note that she is in her 65th year and I am delighted to see further evidence, as we saw yesterday with the Minister, Deputy Quinn, of the folly of our current position of forcing highly talented and productive people in many areas of Irish life to arbitrarily step down from being productive members of society and become dependants of the State overnight merely because they have reached a chronological number.

I ask the Leader to ask the Minister for Health when he comes to this House for his much anticipated visit if he will devote a few minutes to the vexed issue of medical education. I am sorry if I sound like a broken record on this issue but I refer to the accounts in the newspapers this morning of a fitness to practice hearing of the Medical Council in which a young doctor from a European medical school, who was noted by her senior colleagues while at work in a hospital in the jurisdiction of our Republic to have exhibited evidence of deficiencies in basic medical knowledge and when subjected to an informal assessment was found to have gross levels of deficiency, such that the Medical Council has sanctioned that doctor. The full scale of the sanctions are not yet known. I do not wish to appear to victimise this individual doctor. The failure is not the doctor's; it is ours. We are about to embark on this great experiment of bringing in hundreds of foreign doctors to a new and as yet untrained acute assessment system to plug the gaps in a country whose health service has more medical schools per head of population than any country in Europe. If we are to deal with the many problems of our health service it is essential that we deal with the fundamentals of health service reform in the term of this Oireachtas and not in some putative future Oireachtas when there could be a different Government. Also, we must finally turn the focus onto the need to fundamentally reform medical education and training in this country.

I join my colleagues in congratulating our other colleagues on the new arrivals. It is wonderful. Nothing is more important than having children. One of the unanticipated truths of the peace process was the notion that we all now believe we should make love, not war.