An application is to be made to the High Court next week to have the names of more than 300 doctors erased from the medical register.
The Medical Council is seeking to strike the doctors from its register as a result of their failure to pay annual retention fees.
The annual fee amounts to €340.
Doctors not on the register are not allowed to practise medicine.
Usually the public is only informed of doctors being struck off the register when they have been found guilty of professional misconduct.
However, at a press briefing in Dublin yesterday, the council said the 300-plus doctors had been issued with reminders to pay their fees and had failed to do so. The money is overdue since last July.
It said some of the doctors who will be the subject of Monday's High Court application may currently be practising in the State but the majority have probably gone abroad to work or are foreign doctors who worked here for a time and have now returned home.
Some may no longer wish to be on the register, some may have changed address and not received a warning notice from the Medical Council, and some may even be dead, the council admitted.
If a doctor seeks to be reinstated on the register at a later stage he or she will have to pay double the retention fee and may also have to pay the costs of the High Court application.
