Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Twelve registration boards have been established to date, and eight of these have opened registers incorporating ten professions. The remaining four boards are working towards the opening of the registers for an additional five professions. I fully appreciate that some practitioners and service users may be frustrated that it is taking longer than expected for some registers to open. It should be appreciated, however, that when applying a statutory regulation to a profession, there is only one opportunity to have the register opened correctly. This takes time and must be done in consultation with the relevant professions.

Entry onto a professional register provides a significant signal to members of the public that the individual in question has reached important standards of training, expertise, conduct and competence. Patients can have confidence in someone's professional standing on the basis that his or her qualifications have been independently verified. Limiting the period available to assess educational programmes to less than a year radically undermines this confidence and introduces an enduring patient-safety risk. I do not doubt the good intentions of the Senators in proposing this amendment but, for the reasons I stated, having consulted the regulator and being mindful of the implications for patient safety associated with a mandatory one-year requirement, I cannot support the amendment.