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

I will briefly give another example of public bodies on which this money would be better spent. In the recent budget I was quite flabbergasted by the Estimate for health expenditure. As we know, the Estimate was significantly increased in the context of Covid-19 and rightly so but in the area of health research in the HSE, there was no increase this year at all. I was absolutely amazed by that because I would have thought that in the context of Covid-19, surely we should be pouring money into public health research, especially given the situation we are facing and our awareness of the importance of research in that area. That is a further example to illustrate my point. Do we want to subsidise, with public money, some IT firm to come up with the 15th upgrade of the iPhone or some such, or would we rather that money went into public health research? I know what I would prefer.

More generally, there is an issue with a lack of funding for our universities. The Minister is saying that we are doing that as well but the investment, per student, in third level education in this country is abysmally low.

I remember attending an event held by one of the student unions last year. It was about the funding of third level education. It was pointed out that there was more investment in horse racing per horse in this country than in third level education per student. Per capita investment in our students is very low. We note that Irish universities have been falling in the international rankings over recent years. It is very obvious that there are other areas in which this kind of public expenditure would be more beneficial from the point of view of our society than handing it to a relatively small group of multinationals. I have made the point. It is obvious that we disagree with the Minister.