← All articles

CAO applications rose from 76,899 in 2025 to 88,817 in 2026. For some of the professions Ireland finds hardest to staff, more school-leavers want a place than there are places to give: In 2023 there were 14,846 CAO applications for nursing and midwifery and 2,231 acceptances (NMBI).

Where home training falls short, employers recruit staff trained abroad, often through the Critical Skills Employment Permit, which is open to occupations the State lists as in short supply. Staff trained abroad make up 43% of doctors working in Ireland and about half of the nursing register. That makes permits a useful measure of where Irish training does not meet demand. We compare the places available, the people trained, the permits issued and the official shortage assessments, profession by profession, to ask where more places would lead students into work that needs doing here.

How much of each profession is trained abroad?

The clearest measure comes from the regulators. Doctors, nurses and pharmacists must register before they can practise, and each regulator records where new registrants qualified.

Permits tell the same story from the other side. Setting new permits against the number of people trained at home gives a rough sense of how far each profession depends on recruitment from abroad.

Permits: A dip in 2025, a rebound in 2026

The Department of Enterprise publishes permits by the employer’s sector each month. Health employers have been the largest single user of the permit system in every year since 2020 except 2022, when technology firms briefly led. The figures also show a sharp fall in 2025 and a recovery this year.

• Health employers received 12,501 permits in 2024, 32% of all permits (our calculation). In 2025 they received 7,948.
• From January to September 2026 they received 8,037 – already more than in all of 2025 and 34% more than in the same months of 2025, though still below the 9,900 of January to September 2024 (our calculations from the monthly figures).
• The 2025 fall was concentrated between April and July, when between 1,668 and 2,180 permits a month were issued, against 3,798 in January.
• The trough coincides with the switch to the Department’s new online permit system on 28 April 2025, which had technical problems and delays (EY). Health hiring was also constrained: The HSE was working to staff ceilings, INMO says about 6,000 funded posts were vacant in 2025, and in mid-2026 the HSE was 5,600–6,000 below its approved staffing limit (Irish Times, August 2026). The rule that half an employer’s staff must be Irish or EEA blocked some nursing home renewals, and DETE now plans to amend it. A fall in permits is not the same as a fall in need.
• Permits to ICT employers fell from 10,832 in 2022 to 3,630 in 2025. But 2022 was exceptional: The figure was 4,725 in 2020 and 4,615 in 2021. Against that baseline, 2025 was about a fifth lower (our calculation). ICT permits are up 14% so far in 2026, but ICT’s share of all permits has dropped below 10%.

Medicine: Many graduates, too few staying in the system

Ireland does not train few doctors. It trains a lot, but many of them do not stay.

Sources: OECD/European Observatory, State of Health in the EU – Country Health Profile 2025: Ireland; Department of Health, 10 March 2023; HEA, Medical Training in Ireland (June 2024); Medical Council, Medical Workforce Intelligence Report 2025 (43% is our sum of the 13.9% EU/UK and 29.5% international shares).

The schools are half international

• State-funded places for Irish and EU students are capped by Government: About 305 a year from 1978, raised to 725 (including 240 graduate-entry places) from 2006.
• In 2021/22, 46% of 1,403 medical student places went to non-EU students (Department of Health).
• Of about 1,250 medicine graduates in 2022, 51% were domiciled in Ireland and 45% outside the EU. Nine months later, 99% of the Irish-domiciled graduates were working in Ireland, against 49% of those from outside the EU (HEA). No one publishes figures beyond that; the OECD says most leave after their first degree but gives no number.
• Few go on to an Irish internship, the first step to practising here. In 2025, 42 doctors from outside the EEA who needed work permits took up intern posts (HSE; some others are exempt from permits, so this may understate the total), against roughly 560 non-EU graduates a year implied by the 2022 figures (our calculation; a pointer, not a like-for-like comparison).

The workforce is becoming less home-trained

• Of 3,008 doctors joining the register for the first time in 2022, the latest year published, 867 (28.8%) qualified in Ireland (Medical Council).
• Doctors who trained abroad are concentrated in posts outside formal training schemes, which limits their own career progression. In 2025, just over half of hospital doctors below consultant level (5,034 of 9,568) were not on a formal training scheme, and two-thirds of them (66.9%) qualified outside Ireland, the EU and the UK. On training schemes, 68% qualified in Ireland (Medical Council).
• Many come from countries short of health workers themselves. Pakistan (2,741) and Sudan (1,336) were the top two countries of qualification for international doctors working in Ireland in 2025 (Medical Council) – 4,077 doctors, 18% of the clinically active workforce (our calculation). Both were on the WHO’s 2023 safeguards list, which asks all countries to avoid actively recruiting health workers from them. The list concerns recruitment by employers and states; it does not restrict health workers’ own right to move. The WHO’s proposed 2026 list, presented to member states in March 2026 and due to be published after internal clearance, keeps Sudan but drops Pakistan.
• Some specialties rely heavily on doctors who trained abroad. In 2025 only 31.4% of emergency medicine doctors qualified in Ireland, and fewer than half in obstetrics and gynaecology (42.5%), paediatrics (46.8%), anaesthesia (47.4%) and surgery (49.3%) (Medical Council).

Places are growing – slowly

Sources: Department of Further and Higher Education press releases of 12 July 2022, 16 and 24 February 2026; Queen’s University Belfast / gov.ie, 2024; HEA, 21 August 2026; University of Limerick, 10 September 2026; Dáil written answer 17421/25, 8 April 2025.

Places alone will not fix it

Extra places only work if placements, intern, training and consultant posts grow too.

• The Department of Health estimates that every 100 extra undergraduate places need about 92 more intern places five years later and about 75 more specialist or GP training places about eight years later (An Analysis of Medical Workforce Supply, 2023).
• Intern posts rose from 734 in 2019 to 879 in each year from 2023 to 2025; the HSE has been quoted in the medical press as giving 915 for 2026. In 2025, all 701 state-funded graduates offered an intern post took it up (HSE).
• Training posts are already contested. Only 189 of 351 GP training places (53%) went to Irish-trained doctors in 2025 (Medical Independent).
• Consultant posts are a bottleneck too. Applications for approval of new consultant posts fell 36% in 2024, to 347 (Medical Independent, June 2025), and the HSE’s doctor-training body has warned that falling consultant posts are likely to hurt retention of senior trainees (Medical Independent, May 2026).
• Emigration is real, but often temporary. 630 doctors from Ireland received Australian work visas in the most recent year reported (Irish Times, May 2026). Yet 77% of 2016–2020 interns were in further training in Ireland by 2025, and 80% of doctors who finished specialist training in 2017–2021 were working in Ireland (HSE). Ten years after graduating, 69% of Irish-national 2013 medicine graduates were in substantial employment in Ireland (CSO).
• Teaching hospitals limit growth as well as money. The Department says new courses will grow in line with planned HSE clinical placement capacity, and in August 2026 the Irish Times reported universities struggling to turn funding for extra health places into offers for lack of placements.

Who pays: Non-EU fees and the funding of places

Fees from students outside the EU are a large part of university income, and the State says they help pay for Irish and EU places.

Sources: Department of Further and Higher Education, Global Citizens 2030 (January 2024), p. 14; HEA, Key Facts and Figures 2024/25 (the 11.8% share is ours, from 32,940 of 278,880 students); Trinity College Dublin, Consolidated Financial Statements 2025; UCC and RCSI published fee schedules.

The State has said it plainly

• In a Dáil answer in March 2023, the Minister for Further and Higher Education said that “the funding model for medical education in this country has relied on the cross-subsidisation of places for Irish and EU students by the fees paid by non-EU students.” The same answer recorded 3,600 non-EU students among 7,200 in medicine in 2021/22.
• This is not new. The 2006 Fottrell report found that EU medical students were subsidised “by up to 50%” by non-EU income, and that 53.9% of the medical schools’ recurrent funding in 2001/02 came from non-EU students.

What one student brings in

• At Trinity in 2025/26, a non-EU medical student paid up to €57,000 a year. For an Irish or EU medical student, the State paid €5,371 in tuition fees and the published student contribution was €3,000.
• That is not the full public funding of an Irish or EU place: Colleges also receive a core grant and, since 2022, extra funding for medical places. No official full cost per medical student has been published.
• Trinity’s non-EU fee income more than doubled, from €47.6m in 2017/18 to €107.9m in 2024/25, 15.5% of its total income (our calculation from its accounts).

The other side of the ledger

• The State has started to pay more for Irish and EU medical places. The 2023 Dáil answer said the 2022 agreement raised funding for existing places “to move them to a more sustainable basis”.
• Non-EU students also use clinical training funded by the health service, which Fottrell found was largely unpaid and limited the clinical places available for more EU students.
• Much non-EU income comes from outside medicine: €32.9m of Trinity’s €107.9m came from taught postgraduates. International students make up 38% of new master’s students in Ireland, against an OECD average of 24% (OECD, Education at a Glance 2026).
• The wider funding gap is still open. Funding the Future (2022) put the increase needed in core funding at €307m. Budget 2027 added about €10m of new core funding, according to the Irish Universities Association, against the €190m a year it sought, while cutting the student contribution by a further €150, to €2,350 (Irish Examiner; IUA; Irish Times). Fee cuts and core funding compete for the same money.

Nursing: The largest gap by far

Nurses and midwives received 5,107 new employment permits in 2024, more than doctors and software developers combined. More than two-thirds of new registrants have been educated abroad in each of the last four years, although recruitment from outside the EU fell back in the year to May 2025.

• Undergraduate nursing and midwifery places rose from 1,603 in 2016 to 2,235 in 2024 (Department of Health).
• Demand to study nursing is well above the places on offer. In 2023 there were 14,846 CAO applications for nursing and midwifery and 2,231 acceptances (NMBI). First preferences for nursing honours degrees reached 5,082 in 2026, up from 3,750 in 2024 (CAO).
• Registrations of nurses and midwives educated outside the EU fell from 5,426 to 3,345 in the year to May 2025, taking the overseas share of new registrants from 78% to 68% (NMBI; shares are our calculation).
• On 1 June 2025, 49% of the 92,385 nurses and midwives on the register were educated in Ireland and 48% outside the EU (NMBI).
• Foreign-educated nurses made up 92% of nursing workforce growth between 2021 and 2024 (Department of Health).
• Some of that recruitment draws on countries with too few health workers of their own. Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Ghana were on the WHO’s 2023 safeguards list, which asks all countries to avoid actively recruiting health workers from them; the proposed 2026 list keeps Nigeria but drops Ghana and Zimbabwe. In June 2025 the register included 973 nurses and midwives of Nigerian nationality, 856 Zimbabwean and 414 Ghanaian (NMBI; nationality, not place of training).
• The Department has set a target of doubling undergraduate nursing places by 2030. The August 2026 package adds 268 places a year, about 12% on the 2024 level (our calculation).

Pharmacy: A smaller gap, closing slowly

Pharmacy relies on overseas training too, but the gap is smaller, and places are growing towards the level the Department of Health has modelled. The effect will not show until the early 2030s.

• Of 407 pharmacists registering for the first time in 2025, 179 (44%) trained in Ireland. Of the 228 who trained abroad, 81 qualified in the UK, 96 came through the EU route and 51 qualified elsewhere. Applications from pharmacists qualified outside the EU rose from 147 to 364 in a year (PSI).
• Pharmacists are on the critical skills list, but SOLAS does not list them among its health shortage occupations.
• The Department of Health counted 247 pharmacy places in 2023. New courses at the University of Galway, ATU Sligo and SETU double the number of programmes to six and are expected to add over 150 graduates a year; the August 2026 package counts 151 pharmacy places, which appear to be the same programmes. That takes places to about 400, close to the 397 in the Department’s “increased places” scenario (our comparison).
• Pharmacy is a five-year degree, so the 2025 and 2026 intakes will not register until about 2030–31. On the 2025 ratio of registrants to places, 151 extra places might add roughly 110 registrants a year, still leaving a quarter to a third of new pharmacists trained abroad at 2025 demand (our illustration, not a forecast).
• The Department projects demand for 7,746 whole-time pharmacists by 2040, against 6,137 from home training on current places – a gap of about a fifth, much smaller in proportion than nursing.
• CAO first preferences for pharmacy rose from 575 in 2024 to 599 in 2025 (the field includes pharmacy technician courses); the PSI reports 844 in 2026.

Therapy and other health professions

• CORU, the regulator for therapists, social workers and other health and social care professions, recognised 2,271 international qualifications in 2025, up from 1,354 in 2024.
• Government approved up to 461 extra places a year across nine of these professions in June 2025, and about 274 across 12 in July 2026.

Who wants to study what

CAO first preferences show where school-leavers’ demand is heading.

Engineering: A growing pipeline, still too narrow

Engineering underpins Ireland’s pharmaceutical, medtech, technology, energy and construction sectors, as set out in Engineering Employment in Ireland. The pipeline is growing fast, but from a low base, it is narrow in the specialisms infrastructure needs, and too many students do not finish.

More students, from a low base

• Engineering, manufacturing and construction graduates rose from 7,223 in 2018 to 9,711 in 2023, up 34%, while the EU total rose 2% (Eurostat; our calculation).
• Bachelor’s-level new entrants in these fields rose from 4,672 in 2018 to 5,903 in 2024 (Eurostat). CAO first preferences for engineering honours degrees rose from 4,195 in 2024 to 5,703 in 2026, and for architecture and construction from 2,700 to 3,552.
• In the HEA’s Class of 2024, engineering, manufacturing and construction made up 11.3% of 89,010 graduates.
• Even so, engineering is a smaller share of graduates than across the EU, and core engineering most of all.

Specialist output is small

• There were 322 civil engineering awards in 2023, up from 260 in 2019, plus 90 in structural engineering, 341 in surveying and 114 in town planning (SOLAS). In 2024, 623 new permits went to civil engineers and construction project managers.
• Geospatial and land surveyors and construction planners were added to the critical skills list in May 2026 (DETE).

Few women in engineering itself

• Women were 22% of engineering graduates in 2023, close to the EU’s 21%, but only 23% of architecture and construction graduates, against 44% across the EU (Eurostat; our calculation).
• In the broader group of science and engineering occupations, which includes scientists, women make up 47% of the workforce in Ireland (Eurostat, 2024). The gap lies in engineering, not science.

Too many students do not finish

• About one in three students starting engineering or ICT does not complete an award within five years, against about one in four across all fields.
• The problem starts in first year. Of students who began in 2021/22, the latest group with figures by field, 20% in engineering and 18% in ICT did not progress to second year, against 15% overall (HEA).
• Engineering, manufacturing and construction students who left were the most likely of any field to be in work the following year, at 58.2% (HEA). The jobs market may be drawing some of them out early.
• Raising completion to the all-field average would add graduates without new places.

Where permits fill the gap

Source: SOLAS, National Skills Bulletin 2025 occupational sections (science and engineering; construction). New permits exclude renewals. Permits as a share of employment is our calculation.

• In a single year, new permits equal almost 8% of the production, design and quality engineering workforce, against under 3% for civil engineers and construction project managers. Recruitment agencies name quality, validation, process and automation engineers among the hardest roles to fill in life sciences (SOLAS, November 2025).
• SOLAS projects 21,600 more jobs in science and engineering occupations and 19,600 more in construction occupations between 2025 and 2030, before replacing people who leave.
• Engineers Ireland projects a shortfall of up to 6,000 engineers and technicians at current recruitment rates and has asked for more places on accredited courses (Irish Times, August 2026).

ICT: Experience, not places

Software developers and some ICT roles are on SOLAS’s shortage list, but the data points to a shortage of experienced and specialist staff rather than of graduates.

• CAO first preferences for ICT honours degrees fell from 3,833 in 2024 to 3,265 in 2026, while total applications rose 15%.
• Bachelor’s-level ICT new entrants were 3,584 in 2024, below the 3,993 of 2018 (Eurostat, from data supplied by Ireland).
• Ireland already produces more ICT graduates than most of Europe: 8.6% of all graduates in 2024, against an EU average of 5.0% (our calculation from Eurostat data). Much of the recent growth is in master’s degrees, where many graduates are international students.
• In SOLAS’s November 2025 survey of recruitment agencies, three-fifths of ICT-related mentions of hard-to-fill vacancies asked for at least five years’ experience.
• Graduates who qualify here mostly stay. 92.9% of employed honours graduates from the class of 2024 were working in Ireland nine months later (HEA).
• The Expert Group on Future Skills Needs puts digital specialists employed at about 168,800 in 2025 and projects demand of about 215,400 by 2030, with an annual shortfall of 5,500 to 7,700 by then. It recommends more training capacity in AI, cyber security, data and cloud, and its chair has called for clear permit pathways for priority roles.

Beyond the degree: Trades, care and upskilling

Many of the jobs the State recruits for from abroad are not graduate jobs. Carpenters, healthcare assistants, chefs and drivers are all on SOLAS’s shortage list, and their training runs mostly through apprenticeships and further education. Ireland has the highest share of 25–34-year-olds with a tertiary qualification in the EU: 66.8% in 2025, against 44.8% across the EU (Eurostat). More university places would do little for these gaps.

Source: SOLAS, National Skills Bulletin 2025 occupational sections (social and care, hospitality, construction, transport, science and engineering). New permits exclude renewals. Healthcare assistants are counted within SOLAS’s “other caring services” group. Electricians are rated a potential future shortage, but their 2024 employment and permit figures were not available in the sections we could read.

Construction: Apprenticeships are growing, but not fast enough

• The new target is 12,500 registrations a year by 2030, two-thirds in craft and construction-related programmes (Tertiary Education Strategy 2026–2031).
• The trades are lopsided. Electrical accounted for 3,074 of 9,352 registrations in 2024, but only 88 people started bricklaying and 31 plastering (Dáil answer, February 2025).
• The Department of Further and Higher Education estimates construction needs 78,885 new entrants in 2024–2030 (68,869 with more off-site building), based on about 50,000 homes a year. Retrofitting 500,000 homes by 2030 needs a further 22,779 workers, mostly in craft trades.
• Construction employers received 616 permits in 2020, 2,031 in 2025 and 2,014 in the first nine months of 2026 (DETE). In May 2026 general permits were extended to steel fixers, curtain wallers and concrete pump operators.
• Recruitment agencies name the limited availability and high cost of accommodation as the main barriers to hiring workers from abroad (SOLAS, November 2025).
• Training capacity has been a bottleneck. In November 2025 SOLAS told an Oireachtas committee that backlogs for off-the-job training had been eliminated, but a Dáil answer reported in August 2026 showed 3,017 craft apprentices waiting more than six months at the end of June, 454 of them more than a year.
• Women are almost absent from the trades: 59 of 4,056 people who qualified in a craft apprenticeship in 2025 (Department figures reported by the Irish Times).

Care: Rising demand, steady supply

• Permits for healthcare assistants rose from 55 in 2021 to 3,988 in 2024, and for care workers and home carers from 7 to 835 (Dáil answer, April 2025; these appear to include renewals, unlike the SOLAS figures above). Home carer permits are capped by a quota of 1,000.
• The ESRI projects home support for older people rising from 28.7m hours in 2022 to 44.9m–54.9m a year by 2040, and long-stay care beds from 29,579 to 47,590–53,270.
• Home training is steady: About 2,300 Level 5 major awards a year in care in 2023 and 2024 (SOLAS).
• Pay and conditions are part of the problem. In a 2026 survey of 1,019 general permit holders by the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, 71% reported exploitation, rising to 78% among healthcare assistants.

Hospitality, food and transport

• Permits to accommodation and food employers rose from 814 in 2020 to 3,499 in 2025, and to transport employers from 143 to 1,363 (DETE). Chefs alone received almost 3,000 permits in 2024, including renewals (DETE).
• SOLAS finds the supply of chefs from education and training is not enough to meet demand, and lists HGV and bus drivers as shortages. It cites the attractiveness of the jobs as a challenge in both sectors.

Upskilling: Plenty of money, little recent evaluation

• Further education and training reached 224,000 learners in 2025, down from 229,000 (SOLAS). Skillnet Ireland trained 84,515 people in 2025, down from 90,136. Springboard+ offered over 7,200 places in 2026 and has had over 122,000 participants since 2011.
• Evaluation lags behind. The last published evaluations cover Springboard+ to 2016 and Skillnet Ireland in 2019–20. In December 2025 the ESRI noted that individual National Training Fund schemes had been reviewed only on an ad hoc basis, and set out how they could be evaluated against people who did not train.
• The money is there. The National Training Fund, paid for by an employer levy, had a surplus of about €1.8bn at the end of 2024; Government released €1.5bn of it for 2025–2030, and Budget 2027 added €150m over three years for workforce development including AI skills.

What the Department of Health expects

The Department of Health has modelled how many of each health profession will be needed by 2040, and how many home training would supply on current places with no recruitment from abroad.

Source: Department of Health, Ireland’s Future Health and Social Care Workforce, December 2025, Overview Table 3 and Technical Note Table 4. WTE is whole-time equivalent. Demand is the Department’s “progress” scenario. The gap column is our subtraction; it shows what home training alone would leave unfilled, not a forecast of actual shortages.

So is there a case for more places?

Yes, but not everywhere, not always at university, and not on its own.

What we ask for

About the data

Sources

Published for informational purposes only. Data sourced from the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, the Medical Council, NMBI, PSI, CORU, the HEA, CAO, SOLAS, the CSO, Eurostat, the Department of Health and the WHO, verified against original documents. Does not constitute financial, legal, tax or investment advice. Reproduction permitted with attribution.