Third Level Education
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-02
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

It seems to me that what has happened is effectively a corporate or partially corporate capture of our research programme. If it continues, this is going to be to the detriment of all of us and the detriment of our education system and society, which will lose out on research that does not have an immediate commercial application and, therefore, is not being prioritised under the new strategy.
The petitioners emphasise that there was a lack of participatory process in the development of this strategy. It was not based on evidence. They emphasise that what we see here is industry-centred, commercially-focused, profit-seeking priorities at the expense of arts, humanities and social sciences. In particular, they warn about the dismantling of the current PhD scholarship and postdoctoral fellowship programmes. That is what is being proposed, with a prioritisation of research that is profit related and commercially driven by corporations. This would be to the detriment of us all.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-07-02/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:52:14+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-02