On Friday, the Irish Dental Association again made a call for the authorities to take action on the utterly ridiculous proportion of places for dentistry being allocated to foreign students.
The situation is almost unbelievable: the Dental Association says there are fewer than 100 places on dentistry courses in Dublin and Cork are available through the CAO n UCD and TCD – while 841 students had dentistry as their first preference. The high demand is, of course, reflected in the sky-high points required – but the real shortage in places available to Irish students is being wildly exacerbated by the astonishing fact that 50% of the very limited number of offer are being given to students from abroad.
Irish Dental Association Chief Executive, Fintan Hourihan, told RTÉ that “about 50% of dentistry college places in Ireland go to applicants from outside the European Union, usually from Asia and Canada.”
Further, he added, the majority from overseas return to their country of origin, and Ireland has “significant shortages” of dentists.
He explained that since the 1980s until recently, around 20% of dental places were taken up by foreign students but that this proportion had changed radically – and that it was unsustainable to continue with a situation where half of the places for dentistry were now occupied by foreign students.
“To be fair to the colleges, they have done this at the behest of the Government which has not put the necessary funding into the dental schools,” he said. “The overseas students pay considerably more, so they’re effectively cross-subsidising.
“But the reality is we have huge numbers of talented, hard-working students [from Ireland] who want to study dentistry.
“We have a dire shortage of dentists, I don’t think it is sustainable to have 50% of the places set aside for overseas students who are not likely to practice here.”
Obviously, what has happened is that two problems have been allowed to become more aggravated over the years. Firstly, despite the pattern of wildly profligate public spending in general, successive governments did not invest in making more places available for dental students, despite the obvious demand. That investment is needed because its not a matter of simply providing another lecture theatre: students of dentistry need specialised and expensive dental equipment and furniture. The lack of investment meant that the number of places being provided couldn’t increase according to demand.
Then, the government failed to intervene when it became apparent that an increasing proportion of a very scarce resource – places in dentistry – were being kept for foreign students, leaving Irish students out in the cold.
So this clearly unsustainable situation has been allowed to continue for years, partly because we have such useless government, and partly because we have an absolute terror of being thought to be critical of foreigners in any way, even when a situation has been allowed to develop that clearly disadvantages our own students. It doesn’t help that too much of the Irish establishment has a appalling post-colonial mindset which endlessly elevates everyone else and consistently puts Irish people paddy-last in their own country.
I should clarify that I have no skin in the game: I had no-one doing Leaving Cert this year, but there are many students who must surely feel that it is grossly unfair that they achieved almost maximum points in their exams in order to study dentistry and then lost out to the lottery of random selection and to the fact that half of the available places are being given to their peers from overseas.
Dentistry is a lucrative profession, but the points system should make it available to anyone who is willing to put the work in. Obviously, as ever, kids whose parents are well-off have the advantage of maximum support including grinds and tutorage, but now it seems even that’s not enough. And the only options then left open to students unfairly denied a place despite getting the points seems to be to seek a dentistry course abroad which will be all the more difficult, if not impossible, for less-well-off families to consider as a viable option.
The current system is therefore not just unfair to the point of discrimination, it also works against equality of opportunity.
The Irish Dental Association said this week that Irish dental schools were chronically underfunded and called for the proportion of places allocated to foreign students to be reduced to a maximum of 20%. They pointed out that a cap on foreign students was now being proposed in Australia.
Dr Rory Boyd, President of the Irish Dental Association said, “The current model of producing dental graduates is unsustainable and Irish patients are suffering the consequences of the shortage of dentists. We need to see significant investment in our dental schools from government to increase the number of Irish and EEA dental graduates to meet patient demand.”
The Irish Dental Association is calling on the government to properly fund our dental schools and to limit the number of non-EEA students who make up a large proportion of dental students in the two Irish dental schools (University College Cork and Trinity College Dublin).
A cap on foreign students has been proposed in Australia where Australian students are facing stiff competition from foreign students for places in higher education. The Association has called for a cap of non-EEA students of 20% next year and decreasing to 10% over the next three years.
Non-EEA students pay over €45,000 per annum to train in either UCC or TCD which is used to cross-subsidise Irish dental students due to the years of under-resourcing of our Irish dental schools. The department of higher education relies on this funding model to reduce its’ overall expenditure in Irish dental schools and more broadly across the university system.
Approximately half of the total dental student intake is made up of students from outside the European Economic Area (EEA). This means that there is only a limited number of dental students coming from Ireland or EEA countries. These non-EEA graduates usually return to their country of origin to practice dentistry rather than practising in Ireland.
The high proportion of non-EEA students not only limits the opportunities for Irish and EEA students but also impacts workforce planning, as the vast majority of international students do not remain in Ireland post-graduation.
Furthermore, a survey of Irish Dental Association members this year stated that 63% of dentists struggled to recruit a dentist within the past 12 months. Dental practices cannot cope with the number of patients seeking treatment which is leading to long waiting lists and a decline of the patient access, they added.
The point regarding workforce planning has been previously made to me by dentists who have become increasingly frustrated by the absurdity of the situation, and the inaction of those who need to effect immediate change.
That area is the responsibility of Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, Peter Burke. Both he and the Minister for Higher Education, James Lawless, need to get their act together and immediately put a cap on the number of foreign students taking places in dentistry to the exclusion of Irish students. Given the ineptitude of this government, I suspect that might be like pulling teeth.