Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister, Deputy Harris, and the Minister of State, Deputy Niall Collins, to the House. I wish them both well in their important work. I recall the occasion, in 2015, when President Higgins gave the Edward Phelan International Labour Organization, ILO, lecture on the future of work. I was at that lecture, which was held in the Royal College of Surgeons in St. Stephen's Green, as was Guy Ryder, the head of the ILO. The President is an academic of long standing, having worked for many decades in NUI Galway. In his lecture, he observed that, years ago, if an academic wanted to study the phenomenon of precarious work, he or she would have to leave his or her desk and do a field trip. Now, it is not necessary for academics to leave their desks or their departments because the phenomenon is evident all around them.

The Minister's attention will have been drawn to an analysis carried out by Noteworthy recently on working conditions in the third-level sector. It backs up other evidence published in recent years which shows that precarious or casual work in the third-level sector amongst lecturers and researchers is endemic. In fact, it has been normalised. The Noteworthy work suggests that we have over 11,000 lecturers working on temporary or casual contracts. Last week the case of an assistant lecturer in Technological University Dublin was brought to my attention. I do not mind naming the institution. The lecturer has been there since 2007. Those who joined the organisation in the mid-2010s are leapfrogging him now because of changes to the incremental scale for them. He has been making applications to make sure he is converted to a lecturer position. He should be converted to such a position but this has not happened. There is a deep unfairness and inequity in that. This is not a unique case. I use the case to illustrate a broader point. This is a real issue in our third-level sector.

This week ten years ago, everyone in this House will not need to be reminded, was the week that the troika came to our shores. We all know about the stringent conditions that were attached to public funding and the resources available to us to invest in third-level education and other public services at that time and for a few years afterwards. That lost few years of investment has very much impacted on our third and fourth level sector and has created what one might describe as a generation gap too. There are many thousands of very experienced academics, lecturers and researchers who are tenured, who are in permanent positions and who enjoy a degree of certainty and security in terms of their pay and conditions, but many of the younger generation of academics do not enjoy the same terms and conditions. We cannot build the kind of economy that I know the Minister wants to see and that I want to see, and the kind of society we want to see, if we ignore this problem and if we do not invest to retain and value our best researchers, lecturers and academics.

This is about funding, which is a nettle we need to grasp. Funding is the key. No reference has been made in recent times to the Cassells report and the options contained in it. To the best of my recollection, it was published in late 2015. There are a number of options in it. In my view, the clearest and most sensible option is to publicly fund our third-level institutions and to ensure that access is provided to everybody. Making access available to everybody is the only way that we can create a decent, fair and, indeed, entrepreneurial society to make sure that everybody can achieve his or her ambition on a level playing pitch.

I was the first ever member of my extended family to attend university and I had that opportunity because the State invested in me. In the early to mid-1990s, the State decided that everybody should have such an opportunity, thanks to a decision made by Ms Niamh Bhreathnach as Minister for Education at the time that there would be free fees. University gave me opportunities that my parents and grandparents did not have. It is not that they would not have been capable of going to university but they did not have the opportunity because of financial circumstances. Financial circumstances should not dictate who gets to university and who does not. Making education free and affordable is a big question we will have to tackle in this House over the next period of time but it is an investment that is worth making in our society and economy.

I support the remarks made about supporting our student nurses. This is a running sore that needs to be addressed. Tackling the Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, question and a review of SUSI is important because SUSI, as it is presently constructed, does not properly capture the reality of working lives, employment conditions and how income is made up for so many families in this country.

See this speech in context