Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein)
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642. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills in relation to his announcement that PhDs will receive a €3,000 increase in their stipend, if he can confirm that this applies to institutional scholarships; if the funding for this will come from the additional €60 million in core funding announced in Budget Expenditure Report (2024); and if he will make a statement on the matter. [45349/23]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Under Budget 2024, the PhD stipend provided by the competitive funding agencies under my Department, Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council, is being increased to €22,000 per student per annum for their approximately 3,000 stipend awardees. This builds on the increase that I secured in Budget 2023 and demonstrates strong and substantial progress on this issue. This will take effect from January. There are in the region of 2,000 other PhD students who receive institutional scholarships of varying levels from their host higher education institution. These are financed primarily from the core funding provided to each institution. This is a matter for each institution to consider.

Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein)
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643. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills in relation to his announcement of an additional €4.1 million to "enhance the number of places" in GEM for EU students as part of Budget Expenditure Report (2024), can he outline the estimated number of places this equates to; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [45350/23]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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On 12th July 2022 the Minister for Health and I announced an agreement with the Irish medical schools to increase the number of places available for EU students by 200 over the next five years.

The agreement reached with the medical schools begin with an additional 60 EU students in September 2022, climbing to 120 in September 2023, and up to 200 by 2026.

Minister Donnelly and I committed at that time to prioritising funding an ex­pansion on an equal basis, together with moving the funding of existing medicine places to a more sus­tainable basis. Moving to a more sustainable funding basis is required to reduce medical schools' reliance on fees from non EU students.

We have followed through on that commitment this year with continued enhanced levels of funding from both departments to fund these places at a more sustainable rate.

The July 2022 agreement included Graduate Entry Medicine additional places. To date an additional 10 graduate entry places, 5 in 2022 and another 5 in 2023 have been created, with the other 110 places on direct entry programmes.

This marked a significant expansion in the number of places available to students applying through the CAO system. It increases the opportunities for students to progress to study medicine in Ireland and to help us build our talent pipeline.