Third Level Education
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-23
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James Lawless (FF), Kildare North

I sympathise with the plight of people. The Deputy asks what I am doing about that. I am creating more professionals. I am creating more college places and more capacity on those courses that are in demand. I am doing this for two reasons. The first is to enable access for professionals into those courses and the other is to ensure that we have a supply of graduates into the system to provide the services that the Deputy speaks about.
It is not related to my Ministry but there are incentives for GPs practising in rural areas. The rural practitioner allowance is a payment made to GPs taking on a rural practice to reflect the nature of the work they do, which can be somewhat different.
In terms of conversations with the Department of Health, the Minister for Health and I have had a number of conversations on this issue. We very much have a shared goal and I want to thank the Minister for Health publicly for her collaboration and cooperation with me on this piece of work. I also want to thank the Minister for Education and Youth in that regard because we are also looking at speech therapists, educational psychologists and a number of different professionals within the educational sphere. One of the key aspects to this is not just increasing the number of college places, although that is important, but having the placements that students can go on within the hospital setting as part of their training. The Minister for Health is working with me on that.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-23/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-23