Cabinet Committees
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-24
============================================================

Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

I thank the Deputies for the questions.
We began with Deputy Boyd Barrett in terms of special needs mental health and basically the recruitment issue. Yes, recruitment is the issue. We have allocated resources and what has stymied our endeavour to expand capacity has been actual recruitment itself. In fact, going back over the last two decades, we have increased places fairly significantly in allied healthcare professionals, particularly in the therapists, for example. Of those who graduate, not all go into the health services. Many go elsewhere. Some go abroad, some go into different services. There is an issue there in terms of those additional places that we are creating in third level and have expanded places. Even in Northern Ireland we have procured places from the third level colleges there. There have been challenges in transforming that student cohort into a workforce subsequently. That is just reality. There is no point in nodding your head; that is it.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-24/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:40+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-24