Dr. Niall Kennedy:

I thank the committee for the invitation. I am speaking on behalf of a new campaigning organisation, the Irish Precarity Network. Since 2018, I have been employed in Trinity College Dublin as a French lecturer. For the first two years, I was paid hourly. I received a flat fee per class, which was supposed to cover all preparation and marking time.

I had no pension contributions or any right to sick pay. During those years, however, I taught the same number of classes as my permanently employed colleagues. The Cush report of 2016 envisaged that an hourly-paid arrangement should only be used for occasional visiting lecturers teaching on highly specialised modules to fulfil a specific need. Much of my teaching was on core modules, however, which were taken by every student in our department. The need for this teaching was ongoing and predictable but my salary and my contract were neither ongoing nor predictable.

I taught more than 200 students per year and each of them paid at least €3,000; the biggest financial contribution of students in any EU country. Yet, as an hourly-paid lecturer and despite being qualified to PhD level, I made less than €7,000 in a given year. The starting salary for a full-time lecturer at Trinity College Dublin is €36,369.

Since 2020, I have been on a series of temporary contracts which give me somewhat better terms but this June, in just a few months, when my current contract expires, I will again be unemployed, as has happened to me every year for each of the past five years. I hope to return to work in the sector in September but there is no guarantee I will be offered another contract either by Trinity College Dublin or anywhere else. I am 40 years old. I live in Dublin; a city with very high rents and cost of living. I exist in constant insecurity and worry about the future.

My situation is very common. Across Irish higher education institutions, precarious employment practices are now the norm. As members will read in our group’s submission to this committee, 50% of teaching and lecturing staff in Ireland are either part-time or on a temporary contract. This equates to approximately 13,000 lecturing staff in a given year. According to the Irish Federation of University Teachers, IFUT, the rates of precarious employment in Irish academia are worse than for any other branch of the public service. According to recent research, just under half of all precarious workers in higher education earn a salary that keeps them below the poverty line in Ireland. This includes up to 77% of hourly-paid staff. Extra and unpaid work is commonly reported, for example, the increasing burden related to the pastoral care of students. Precarious academics frequently have to rely on social welfare during periods of unemployment, such as the summer months. One branch of the Government is, therefore, subsidising another branch of the Government to offer these very low wages. Precarious academics have very few of the entitlements, benefits or other forms of workplace protection offered to those on permanent full-term contracts.

It is important to stress that this is not a short-term situation. These precarious staff have no obvious career progression nor any route out of precarity since university management now replaces retiring permanent lecturers with still more hourly-paid positions. Many precarious workers have endured these conditions for a decade or more. According to our research, the average is 7.1 years for women and 5.7 years for men. This also means, therefore, that significant gender and racial imbalances are created by a reliance on precarious labour. Some studies have shown that up to two thirds of precarious academics are women and they make up most of the extreme cases. No institution that relies heavily on precarious work can claim to support gender or racial equality.

This situation impacts heavily on research and teaching. Precarious staff are not paid for their research and receive no paid time off or financial support towards their expenses from institutions. The very high turnover of precarious staff within institutions - a situation intended to prevent them from qualifying for a contract of indefinite duration - has a significant impact on teaching quality too since these lecturers must constantly learn new material for new groups of students in new institutions.

While there is no doubt that Government funding of universities has been significantly reduced, we believe that the universities should also be held to account for their own choices and spending priorities. Significant expansion of the spend on managerial staff has meant that Irish higher education institutions now employ more non-academic than academic staff. They have found the money for significant campus developments but they have neglected the backbone of their core functions of teaching and research.

We offer some possible solutions. We believe that hourly-paid contracts should be banned. We believe universities should move away from a reliance on short-term contracts. The sector should no longer be subject to the employment control framework. The State should set targets for the percentage of staff in a university who are precarious and sanction those institutions which fail to meet them. For the past 15 years and more, the Irish State has stood by and allowed the ruthless and devastating exploitation of these workers employed in an Irish public service. It is time for this to end. I am calling on this committee to exercise its oversight function and ensure that a strategy to end precarious employment is at the heart of this funding Bill. Go raibh míle maith agaibh.