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

Why can he not do that? I do not accept he cannot. The research and development tax credit is worth €750 million a year in most cases to multinationals. I would much rather give our PhD researchers a living income and cut slightly the money going to the most spectacularly profitable companies in the world, and the Minister would have plenty of money. In our budget submission, we proposed a stipend for all PhD researchers and costed it at €100 million. We could take €100 million, therefore, off the super-profitable multinationals and give it to PhD researchers to allow them to have a living income. The Government does have a mechanism to do this because it gave a once-off cost-of-living payment of €500 to everybody. The idea, therefore, the Minister can do it only for people in agencies under his remit is simply not true because the Government did it on a once-off basis for everybody. Let us give everybody who is a PhD researcher a living wage. The money is there.

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