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

Will the Minister clarify whether PhD researchers are treated like workers? Members of the Postgraduate Workers Organisation are in the Gallery and this is another issue they have asked about. If a PhD researcher has the same status as a worker, they should get sick leave and all the other entitlements a worker gets, given they are workers and without them our universities and other third level institutions would not be able to function. They need to be acknowledged as such.

When the Minister says he is going to try to increase the stipend, will that be for everybody? Huge numbers of our PhD researchers are on miserable incomes, far less than the stipend, and the Minister could have at least met the recommendation of €25,000. If one deserves it, they all deserve it but even that is far less than the average among the rest of Europe and very significantly less than would be required to make the country, as the Minister suggested will be the case, the best place in Europe to be a PhD student. Our PhD researchers, who are driving research and innovation and keeping our universities going, are living in poverty. Moreover, there are also the visa and immigration issues that many of them are facing and they would like to know what the Minister is going to do about them. He knows what the issues are.

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