Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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22. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills following the recommendations in the National Review of State Supports for PhD Researchers, the plans to ensure that all PhD researchers, regardless of their funding source, receive at least €25,000 per annum stipend; his views on the issue of giving PhD researchers a worker status; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [14502/25]

James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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Under Budget 2025, additional funding was announced for Research Ireland in order to increase its PhD stipend level to €25,000, i.e. an increase of over 31% in two years. This announcement builds on the increases secured under preceding Budgets, demonstrating my Department’s consistent focus and progress on this issue. It has come into effect from 1 January 2025.

In doing so, my Department has now implemented the recommendation of the independent review of State Supports for PhD researchers for an optimum stipend level of €25,000, subject to funding availability. That review exercise, announced in October 2022, is the first time that PhD provision in Ireland was so comprehensively reviewed.

For those PhD students in receipt of stipends from national competitive funding agencies outside the remit of my Department, the level of stipend awarded is at the discretion of each funder and its parent Department.

Institutional scholarship supports received by PhD students from their higher education institution are funded primarily by the core funding provided to the sector. The use of core funding is at the discretion of each higher education institution whose autonomy in this respect is established in legislation.

As part of Budget 2025, a National Training Fund funding package of nearly €1.5 billion over a six-year period was agreed for the tertiary sector. This includes €650m in a core funding package for the higher education institutions, to utilise as they deem appropriate consistent with the need to secure the most beneficial, effective and efficient use of those resources.