Bellkicker,
no, doctors here (I'm in Germany at the moment) are not the best European earners. A German Hausarzt (GP, family doctor) earns about the same as a British GP. The cash starts pouring in if you're lucky enough to get a position at a Uniklinik.
Yeah 55 must be a record eh? I'm not ageist but you have to draw the line somewhere...
Ah, deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache.... The first foreign language in British schools is French and German is usually the second but some schools have in deed replaced this with Spanish. Well at least I'm proof that Brits *can* master foreign languages!
Re PRHO year, I would say to those interested students that they should contact the hospitals/NHS trusts directly. Ya never know if ya don't ask. Other than that they can face being condemned to Greenland for a year (I wouldn't mind going there actually! But patient contact must be pretty minimal, eh?

)
Trinners,
you don't understand just how crap an Abitur grade of 3,x is. I'm sure most Irish admissions tutors would baulk at it.
How would you feel if you worked your butt off at school to get decent grades for medical school, only to find out that the applicant standing behind you got crap grades and got admitted and you didn't. I know grades are *not* the be-all and end-all but a profession of such high calibre like medicine needs members who can perform under pressure and doing well in exams is a sign of this.
The point I was making was that I found it unbelievable how easy it is to get a place at a German medical school and you must admit that if it's easy to get accepted then the quality of doctors produced is going to be affected to a certain extent. The BMJ article was an interesting read, thanks.