Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief and will focus my remarks on what is the scandalous inclusion of the extra €16,000 a year for a super junior Minister, on top of an annual salary of €124,000.

Before I discuss that point, I wish to make one point about higher education. There is a crisis of funding in higher education right now which is a consequence of a model of relying on non-EU students as a cash cow. Very quickly, the same sorts of pressures we saw for many years will come to pass again where universities will be rightly crying out that they do not have enough funding. The Government then, instead of investing to ensure they have the funding needed to properly run our third level institutions, will increase the so-called student contribution or will attempt to return to full fees. The student movement needs to have its eyes and ears very much open to this attack which could come down the line in the course of this Government and to prepare to resist and defeat it.

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