Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On this issue, I very much agree with Deputy Sherlock and how he put it. That is the balance we are trying to get right. What is appropriate to belong within the legal remit of a research agency? What is appropriate to belong with independent autonomous higher education institutions?

To be very clear on the European question, which I want to come back to again, we should not allow the record of Dáil Éireann to suggest that there is a uniform approach to the status of PhD researchers across the member states. There is not one; that would be counterfactual and it is not the position.

I had very good engagement with a number of PhD research groups. They rightly spoke - and I agree with them - of the need for us to do more to better support them. That is something we can all agree on. We may disagree on how to go about it, but we agree on how important it is to protect and promote talent in our country. Very interestingly, when you ask people to give you examples of which countries they think are the best in class inthis, they suggest different countries that might have different ways of approaching the issue. There is not a uniform, one-size-fits-all approach here.

Quite rightly at a European level - where we are proud members, are sitting around the decision-making table and are contributing to the development of these guidelines and others - as well as at a national level, there is the need to continue to do more to support researchers. That is why we have increased the stipend in this budget. That is why we have taken a number of steps to equalise levels of stipends between the IRC and SFI over recent years. It is why we intend to go further on the stipend level. It is why we will now publish the final report by the co-chairs. This month, there has been a really extensive process; it was an exhaustive process in many ways. Once I publish it, I would be very happy to come back either to this House or the Oireachtas committee and tease through what next concrete steps we can and should take to better support PhD researchers in Ireland. I very much look forward to engaging with colleagues on that.

See this speech in context