Averil Power (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

To pick up on Senator Norris's point about the RCSI and its graduates in Bahrain, we have not had an opportunity to discuss that issue directly with the Minister to date, although it was discussed in the education committee some months ago as the college is looking for accreditation from the Irish Medical Council for its programmes in Bahrain. It is an area of considerable reputational risk for Irish education as a whole and I urge the Minister, outside of this legislation, to focus her attention on it and consider the risk for Irish education because it is very serious. There are still RCSI-trained doctors in hospital in Bahrain simply for treating injured protesters. RCSI staff and students have been discriminated against purely on the basis of their faith.

The quality of the RCSI's educational offering is without question in terms of the lectures and so on but the training taking place in hospitals overseas, particularly in Dubai, is questionable. Much of the training is done in militarised hospitals where people have been tortured in the past. That claim was made when we discussed this issue with the Higher Education Committee, HEA, the Medical Council and others in the education committee. The representative from the RCSI denied that torture had ever happened in Bahraini hospitals-----