Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. It is very worthwhile that the Minister is available to the committee to give us constant updates because it is a new Ministry. As Senator Malcolm Byrne said, there must be some recognition of our Government partners having pushed for this Ministry in particular. It has shown its worth, as has the Minister. Given the limited time, I want to focus on one area the Minister has come here to speak to us about and that is PhD candidates. We are doing another piece of work at the moment around mental health supports within primary and secondary schools. One of the things the stakeholder groups have raised with us as an issue is recruitment of those who support.

We already know through child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, that it is an issue but we have a backlog in this country when it comes to psychological supports in education. I know the Minister is aware of this and that the working group is also working on it, but there are three types of PhD students going through psychological research programmes and two of those are funded through the HSE. More recently the students on the counselling programme are also funded since this budget, but the last are the educational psychology PhD candidates. It is very hard to explain or understand why that is, particularly as they all come to their courses from the same route. These candidates do 300 hours of work placement, often with CAMHS and some of it with disability services so they are hugely valuable for us, even while they are doing that training. Looking at the clinical psychology PhD candidates for instance, they are being paid a full-time salary for their work as a PhD candidate. Only 18 of these educational psychology PhD students are due to graduate in the next year, or possibly in 2024. Can the Minister explain what the difficulty is in ensuring that kind of equality between all of those candidates given that when they come out, they have the exact same qualifications?