Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Covid-19 has further underlined the need for proper mental health services. We have thousands of adults and children waiting for assessments and services. I spent an hour on the phone last night to a young student studying to be a psychologist. She told me a tale of woe about the plight of people studying to be psychologists and trying to get on doctorate training programmes to be psychologists. In their MA programme, they pay €8,000 to €15,000 in fees. The number of places for psychologists in doctorate training has fallen in the last year and they are not funded. Some of them are funded somewhat but not sufficiently. In education and counselling psychology, they are not funded at all. To make a long story short, she said that working-class people who want to do psychology have virtually no chance of getting doctorates because of the cost, fees, hurdles and obstacles put in their way.

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