Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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872. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the estimated full-year cost of ensuring all postgraduate research students receive a full-year €30,000 stipend; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [35663/25]

James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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In the region of 10,000 students are enrolled annually in PhD programmes across Ireland. Of these, approximately 4,000 are privately funded, either by their employer or by themselves. The remainder receive public funding from a host of sources including this Department, the research funding agencies of other Government Departments and a small number are funded through the Horizon Europe Marie Curie-Sklodowska Actions programme under Horizon Europe, the EU's umbrella research and innovation funding programme. Based on approximately 6,000 PhD students in receipt of public support, a €30,000 stipend would involve an annual budgetary requirement of €180 million per annum.

In Budget 2025, additional funding was announced for Research Ireland in order to increase the stipend to €25,000 per annum for the roughly 3,000 PhD students that its competitive programmes support, thereby implementing in full the recommendation of the recent independent review of PhD provision. This in turn built on previously announced increases and equates to a cumulative increase of over 31% over a two-year period. This increase has come into effect as of 1 January 2025.