Annie Hoey (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. We welcome the Research and Innovation Bill, which will be a strong foundation for promoting and advancing research in Ireland and ensuring that research bodies and individuals get easy and equal access to funding and opportunities. There are, however, certain points that require a more detailed approach to ensure the Bill will function as intended and I will briefly address them today.

First and foremost, the Bill promises to place arts, humanities and social sciences on an equal status to the STEM disciplines and to provide equal funding opportunities for all fields. It is not just because I am an arts graduate myself and therefore I feel somewhat sympathetic to the cohort that studies these subjects, but I do think it is very important that a balance is found. I am excited to see this at the core of the Bill, alongside the encouragement and comfort it offers to researchers in applied humanities but I would like to see more action on the matter.

Along with my colleagues in the Labour Party in the Lower House who have debated the Bill, I would like to see more clarity on whether the board of the agency will have a voice and representation for non-applied research for social sciences and humanities. While both the legislation and the statements by Professor Philip Nolan, who has been appointed to the body even before its establishment, ensure the promotion of diversity and inclusion to fit international competitive research strategy, I would like to see equality and diversity put into action on the board across all of the disciplines. Reaffirming the equal funding to access to social sciences and humanities is instrumental for the Bill to function successfully and elevate Ireland's research to an internationally applicable or recognised level.

Furthermore, while the Bill and Taighde Éireann are great innovations for the research field of the State, they lie in the same context as budget failures in various higher education institutions across Ireland. Earlier in the year we witnessed this is in UCC and we also saw it when the Higher Education Authority announced that the country's second largest university, TUD, faces serious concerns about the management of its €8.6 million budget deficit. This deficit is attributed to rising costs and falling student enrolment in the college, causing reduced Exchequer funding. The reality that we are witnessing is alarming but the consequences of it raise even more concerns. Such budget deficits not only affect community involvement within academia but also cause more and more work to fall on the shoulders of fewer people. If the Bill is aiming to lift Irish research to a global standard, then we need to ensure that it is able to handle the societal and economic challenges that those and other academic institutions in Ireland face.

We must also ensure that the Bill takes into account the unique individual experiences of researchers themselves. This is especially urgent as we know that PhD researchers face some of the hardest challenges in academia. It is no secret that PhD researchers across this country are struggling to make ends meet when it comes to basic human needs such as housing and everyday expenses. On average, PhD researchers are paid well below the minimum wage and have no workers' rights. This means they have no sick leave and no parental leave. They have no leave of any meaningfulness unless they have a kindly supervisor who will allow them take the leave. They have nothing of that nature. How are we expecting the agency to reach a globally competitive and internationally applicable research and innovation standard if those who are responsible for it are underpaid and overworked? The Postgraduate Workers' Organisation has sensed the urgency and is seeking to apply an employment model for the postgraduate researchers. It wants to further improve its benefits by showing the advantages of having PhD students as employees in various EU member states. Only very recently it launched its report, which examined the state of PhD researchers across the European Union; how much money they get; what sort of stipends they get; and what kind of contracts they are on. That is a really important piece of research because it highlights the state of play for PhD researchers within the European context, within which the organisation set up by the Bill will be very much entangled.

Postgraduate researchers are workers in all but name, pay and conditions. They have just the work and unfortunately nothing else. I am afraid that the Bill and Taighde Éireann will not reach the desired outcomes if the difficulties of PhD researchers are not properly addressed by the Government. The Minister, Deputy Harris, has said he would publish the second report on support for PhD students to provide clarity on the status of PhD researchers, in terms of whether they are workers or students. We need that clarity as soon as possible. I echo the calls of the Postgraduate Workers' Organisation for the report to be released as soon as possible. We need the situation for PhD researchers to improve. We cannot claim to be a nation of excellent research - the land of saints and scholars - if our researchers who are the core target audience for this Bill are so poorly treated.

Only when the representation of social science and humanities, the budget deficits across HEIs and the individual well-being of Irish researchers are addressed can we be confident about the prosperous application of the Research and Innovation Bill.