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

I welcome the opportunity to contribute on the Bill. I want to express a little scepticism. I am open to the debate but a change of name for Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council and simply amalgamating them does not mean anything in and of itself in advancing our support for research and innovation. Most particularly, if it does not address the issue of core funding. As I understand it, Ireland is near the bottom of the EU league table when it comes to research and innovation funding. According to the figures available to me, Ireland spends 0.96% of GDP on research and innovation, putting us in the bottom half of the EU. That compares with an EU average of 2.23%, which is more than twice what we spend. If we compare Ireland with best practice in Europe, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Germany, Finland and others spend 3% of GDP or more. Ireland is way behind in the amount we invest in research and innovation.

I am not sure if those figures include the big tax breaks of €700 million or €800 million per year that are given by the Department of Finance and that mostly go to the big multinationals, which is in and of itself an issue. That is a huge amount going to big corporations for research and innovation when not enough is going to universities, education institutions and, critically, to the actual researchers themselves.

As well as Ireland being a poor performer in the provision of core funding to our researchers, they are plagued by very poor stipends when they are doing their PhDs. I acknowledge the Government, under pressure from groups such as the Postgraduate Workers Organisation, has improved that somewhat. It is still far short of what the researchers hoped for. If they are in receipt of stipends from SFI or the IRC, it goes up to €22,000 per year, which is far less than in many of the countries I mentioned earlier. The stipends in those countries can be €30,000, €40,000 or €50,000 per year so the researchers make a decent living. Some 70% of those doing postgraduate courses do not get SFI or IRC stipends; they get far less. A lot of our people who are doing postgraduate courses and research are living in poverty and deep precarity. I do not see how that tallies with a serious commitment to advance research and innovation if the people who actually do it are living in poverty.

I am sorry that Deputy Michael Healy-Rae has left the Chamber but he referred to people who had not gone to university or college but just had a pair of arms and a pair of hands hanging out of their body. He was absolutely right because the most serious anthropological study of how human beings became human beings and became the most advanced species was related to precisely that fact. When we stood up, it freed up our hands and the manual dexterity and use of the thumb and our hands in particular that allowed-----

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