Annie Hoey (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am here to talk about Bank of Ireland's announcement that it is withdrawing the graduate entry medicine, GEM, loan, the only loan available that is specific to graduate entry medicine students. It came with conditions such as a moratorium on paying back the loan before four years. I am not asking any Minister of State or Government to interfere in the commercial or operational decisions of any bank, even if we have a shareholding in that bank. I recognise that banks need to be able to do whatever they want so they are free to withdraw their loan product but on behalf of the students I have spoken to we are seeking engagement from Government on alternative financing options or funding supports.

A survey was done by a number of students who will be affected by this and about 10% of all the Irish GEM students responded to it over a couple of days, which is statistically significant. Some 92% of them said they require external financial support to pay the university fees and we all know how much those university fees are; they are €16,000 per year to study GEM. That is colossal money. It is €64,000 that they have to take out as a loan. Some 74% of those who responded have or would have eventually sought to avail of the Bank of Ireland loan and that is a significant number. A number of them worry they will not be able to apply for it due to the lack of a suitable guarantor. Some 71 of the 141 respondents said the fees caused them to delay studying medicine, which is significant when we have a crisis in the healthcare system. On top of that, an additional 100 out of the 140 respondents pay accommodation costs and we all know how expensive that is. A number of them felt compelled to add in additional comments and all of them are extremely concerned, including about their capacity to continue the course. Bank of Ireland has said it will allow them to finish it out so hopefully that has been dealt with. A number of respondents feel they will not be able to undertake graduate medicine because they do not have the option of this loan.

The biggest issue people have raised is that anyone who has spoken to Bank of Ireland, including myself, has not been able to get clarity on the alternative options which have been touted. A Bank of Ireland statement on this matter mentions that it has other loans available but as far as I can tell none of the other loans seems to offer the four-year moratorium. This would be unreasonable, when it is already an accelerated course, for GEM students who are already compressing medicine into four years. It is an intense course and their final year is extremely intense, as any medical studies are. To then have to start paying back the loan in that final year is not feasible or reasonable and that is something that has come back to me from the many students I have spoken to.

The fees were already exorbitant and we have had conversations before about how it is unrealistic to expect people to pay them. We will never have any sort of diversity in medicine if we have the likes of €16,000 per year fees and if we are locking people out of loans for that money because they cannot get guarantors or take out a personal loan. One of the responses I got from Bank of Ireland was that students could take out a personal loan but that has different requirements with it. A student who said she was planning on studying GEM in August 2023 said her only feasible option right now is to study in the North and even this is a risk as:

I want to live and work in the Republic and as of yet, the government has not fixed the issue of British trained doctors being allowed to apply for an Irish Intern year post-brexit. This means if I do move my partner and family for four years to save on fees I may never be able to come back and work on a training scheme here. It does seem like a neverending maze of dead ends when all I want to is to train as a doctor in my own country.

Has the Minister of State any light to shine at the end of this tunnel?