Sir, – Now that the CAO season is upon us again, it might interest your readers to know that in a number of universities in this country up to 40 per cent of medicine places are reserved for international students.Successive generations of taxpayers worked hard to build up the third-level sector, yet when their daughters and sons apply to study medicine, they discover that close to half the capacity to deliver medicine is reserved for wealthy international students. What a slap in the face for the taxpayer and the many students who work extremely hard yet just fail to get a place on a medicine course.If doctors were two a penny and we were trying to discourage students from studying medicine, there might be some logic to this approach. However, the situation is the opposite, with a growing shortage of doctors in Ireland and the HSE spending a lot of money every year trying to recruit doctors from abroad. You couldn’t make this up.The Government has made some increases to the overall number of medicine places, but this has had a relatively small impact. If the Government had any respect for our hard-working younger generation they would immediately work to stop the universities from reserving places for rich international students and pay the universities the money they would then lose out on. Such an initiative would have a huge effect on available medicine places in our universities. – Yours, etc,ANDREW HOGAN, Crozon, Co Sligo.