Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity)
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I congratulate the Chair. Apologies in advance. I have to leave in five minutes to do a First Stage speech in the Dáil.

I look forward to working with members. Most areas have been well covered, including access to education, with student housing being a key focus, and the question of apprenticeships. The point about corporatisation of third level education is important, and we could look at it.

I will highlight two additional areas that I think will be interesting. One is building on the point that Deputy O'Connell made about the points system. During Covid, there was a discussion about the points system because the problems with it were highlighted. Since active Covid and the measures to do something about Covid have gone, it has been accepted that this is the norm and it is how we ration access to third level education. This is not the norm in other European countries. A discussion where we look at other ways of organising access to third level education and look at other countries would be genuinely interesting and might point to a different way forward.

The issue of working conditions in our third level institutions has been touched on. There are incredible levels of precarity. A high percentage of those who work in our third level institutions are not on full-time, permanent contracts. A subset of that issue is the treatment of our PhD workers, who have had some minor improvements over the past couple of years because of much campaigning but who are still treated pretty poorly. That would be an area we could look at.