Deferring claiming Medical Expenses

I took 10 months off this year to go backpacking round the world, but got medication posted out (78eur/mth). Because I only earned 3000 before leaving, I won't get any tax back from medical expenses, coz I didn't earn enough to pay income tax, so is it possible to defer claiming this years medical expenses until next year, when I'll be working all 12 months ?

The Med1 form says that 'relief is normally claimed for expenses paid in each tax year...' , but this seems a little vague. ( I wasn't able to copy/paste in the whole sentence about 'incurred expenses')

I'm still abroad, so can't contact Revenue at the moment, just thought I'd ask here in advance

Thanks for any help

Luke

You cannot carry medical expenses forward and claim tax relief on them in any tax years other than the one in which the expenses were incurred. You can only claim relief against income tax paid in the year in which the expenditure was incurred.

You sometimes have a choice of which year you can claim for. You can either claim for the year in which the expenses were incurred, or the year in which you actually paid the bills, e.g if you incurred a hospital bill in December 04 but actually paid in January 05, you can either claim them as medical expenses in 2005 because of the hospital stay or in 2006 because of when you actually paid. Obviously you can only claim the once.