The president of the Medical Council has said the tenuous position of doctors from outside the EU in hospital training posts contributed to the lack of questioning of the activities of obstetrician Dr Michael Neary by some of those who worked on his team at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda.
In a speech yesterday, Dr John Hillery backed the finding of the official report which found that the non-consultant doctors "relied totally on references from a consultant, to be kept on in training".
Dr Hillery welcomed the recommendation of Judge Maureen Harding Clarke that "the requirement of a formal reference prior to obtaining a further position should be removed, and replaced by a certificate of competence in listed procedures and treatments and areas of expertise".
The system of temporary registration seemed to have been introduced to give training opportunities to doctors from outside the EU, Dr Hillery said.
However, he said the medical career system, including this registration system, still allowed doctors to stay in training posts for years, "serving the system, but gaining little that is of advantage to their having a long-term career in medicine". He said this had to end.
"All doctors should know where they stand in the career ladder. All doctors must be in posts that they are competent to fill and demonstrating competence commensurate with these. All doctors must be able, through formal and transparent processes, to get a certification of their competencies," he said.
Dr Hillery said no doctor should be expected to fill a post that was beneath their level of competence and no trainee doctor should fill a post that did not have a proper and relevant training content. Dr Hillery said the Irish health system had been kept going by overseas graduates working as non-consultant hospital doctors.
"Many worked for years in the front line to find that the post they had occupied was not recognised for training purposes." He said they were also dependent on the continued goodwill of their consultants for further advancement in the profession.
In the wake of the Lourdes hospital report, the Government is to come under pressure in the Dáil this week to act on a five-year-old proposal to give protection to whistleblowers who expose criminality, or wrongdoing.
In 1999, the Labour Party's Whistleblowers' Protection Bill passed Second Stage in the Dáil without a vote, though it did not make any further progress before the 2002 general election.
Following the election, the Government put it back on the Dáil's order paper but they have since resisted all attempts to progress the Bill further, Labour claimed yesterday.
If passed, the legislation would mean that whistleblowers could not be sued if they disclose wrongdoing by their employers, or within their organisations, and nor could they be fired, or discriminated against.
Under a joint Labour/FG motion to go before the Dáil this week, the Select Committee on Enterprise and Small Business would be ordered to begin the Bill's committee stage and complete it by June.
Mr Rabbitte said there had been cross-party support for it in 1999 "and there is an even stronger case for action now".
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said it was quite clear that the whistleblowers' legislation, if it had been in place, would have made it easier for people to come forward earlier to report the conduct of Dr Neary.