Dr. Niall Kennedy:

For the first two years, when I was an paid hourly, my total take home pay was under €7,000. However, I taught the same number of classes as my permanent colleagues. I was doing the same amount of teaching for a very cheap rate. Now that I am on a temporary contract, I am no longer paid hourly and I get a little more than that - more than €20,000. However, I could name dozens of people in my institution who are on these hourly contracts. These people are often in their 30s as opposed to their 20s.

It is accurate to say that the starting salary is €36,369. That is meant to improve year on year but one does not see the same sort of progression for people who are paid hourly. In terms of the turnover, in my department alone, since I started in 2018, I can name 18 people who have delivered modules and many of them have PhDs or are PhD students. A large number of those have left the sector since 2018. There is a very high turnover.

Both Mr. Brown and Dr. Seoighe mentioned the importance of the relationship between research and teaching. I absolutely agree that high-quality teaching requires somebody with high-quality research skills. However, those of us who are on these temporary contracts are not paid a cent for our research. We are not even given support to go to conferences. We are not given any paid time off to research. If, however, we want to have any hope of getting permanent posts, we have to produce high-quality research that gets published in major journals or by major publishers or we have to attract one of the very small number of important grants. We are not given any financial support to do this almost impossible task.