Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to discuss science and its role and importance in our society and for our future in Science Week. The Minister said in his speech relating to Science Week that science is about being human, and I think that is absolutely right. In a way, it defines what being human is, although Deputy Gannon is also right to say that the other thing that defines what being human is is art. Science and art are the two things that human beings do that are completely unique in that we imagine other possible futures and then we endeavour to make those futures up. That is completely unique to our species. The bumblebees that make the beehive have been making the same beehive for thousands and thousands of years and they do not decide to change the design. No other animal or species is capable of doing that - of imagining something that is not there and then actually trying to find the wherewithal to develop the means to make it happen. These are two uniquely human attributes that give us both a huge responsibility and a huge opportunity.

We have to be serious when we say that we are going to support these things. It is primarily science that we are looking at here but, in a way, the arts are the precursor of science in that you imagine first and then you try to get the materials, the wherewithal and the nuts and bolts to make the thing that you imagine happen. Without art, there is no science, I would argue.

When we look at the level of money that we invest in art and culture, proportionately, it is a tiny fraction of what it should be and pitifully low compared to most of our European counterparts. The estimates seem to vary. One estimate is that we spend about 0.1% of GDP on art. I asked the Minister how we were progressing in addressing that pitifully low level of investment and the reply was that it was maybe 0.2% in actuality, whereas the average in Europe is about 0.6%. It is worth thinking about an important comparison in this regard. The push to militarise Europe with PESCO is by getting military expenditure up to 2% of GDP and most European states are beyond that. They are aiming for military expenditure - the means to kill people - to be three times higher than the average European arts expenditure and it would be about 20 times higher than our current arts expenditure. It is worth dwelling on our priorities given we are using our imaginations and scientific know-how to develop ever more sophisticated ways to kill people, rather than to make society a better place or address the climate crisis.

If that is true of art, let us look at science. The expenditure on research, innovation and science by the Department of the Minister, Deputy Harris, this year was reduced by 3%. It is all very well talking about taking science seriously, having science weeks and blowing the trumpet about the importance of science but, in actuality, we cut the budget and the public expenditure on science. That is pretty shameful, particularly when we look at the people who actually do the research on science. Postgraduate researchers are living on less than the minimum wage and the average earnings for a PhD researcher in this country are €9,000. Imagine trying to live on that.

The Government has taken notice of this because of a massive campaign by the Postgraduate Workers Organisation, PWO, which is demanding PhD researchers be treated as workers, be paid a living wage and get things like sick pay and holiday entitlements instead of being in the precarious situation they are in. The PWO has said researchers need about €30,000 per year. Across much of Europe, such researchers get paid about €50,000. That compares with €9,000 here. The Government has given a marginal increase to those who get the funded PhDs from SFI and the other public body, the name of which I forget. This means only a small proportion of the researchers will see their stipends go from €18,000 to €22,000. That is still way below the living wage and the vast majority of PhD researchers still will not get that, in other words the vast majority of the people we expect to do this science we are lauding on Science Week are living in poverty and under pressure to either leave the country or give up on their scientific research.

The total budget for publicly funded science this year is down 3% to €264 million. How much do we give to the big multinational corporations in research and development tax breaks every year? It was €750 million last year. The Government has also given them an increase in that to bring it up by another €57 million. At the finance committee, we managed to prise out information to the effect that the vast majority of the tax breaks are going to about 100 of the richest corporations in the world, including Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. They are getting money to research new iPhones in order to make fortunes above and beyond the already obscene profits they are making and continue to develop things that, quite frankly, are not that useful to society, while the people who might be developing new medicines, climate technology and other stuff to make our society better are getting a tiny fraction of the money. We need to change our priorities if we are serious about science and its value to our society.

See this speech in context