Research Funding Dail Éireann — 2026-06-25 ============================================================ Jen Cummins (SD), Dublin South-Central I thank the Minister of State for his response. I appreciate it. I am very happy to hear that international best practice will be applied in this situation. I know from my engagement with PhD researchers that Ireland is not on a par with other countries throughout Europe or internationally. There are challenges with regard to the stipends, although I know they have increased over the past while. There is also the issue of employee status. I am speaking about PhD researchers as distinct from doctoral students, which I was myself. I am not talking about somebody who is a student but somebody who is a researcher. I am talking about a role advertised by an institution that states it wants a PhD researcher. With regard to their employment status, if they do tutorials or other work that needs to be protected for them. The Minister of State briefly mentioned types of leave. It is very important this is embedded in the contract so they have the possibility of taking sick leave, annual leave or maternity leave. The future progression and careers of researchers afterwards can be precarious. It is very important to mention that when things are industry led or agency led, whether it is in the arts, humanities and social science or STEM, at all times this research has to be independent. Just because it is funded does not mean the research can be influenced by people looking for a particular outcome. Research has to have its independence. It needs to be verifiable and not just focused on only making more money. I have mentioned previously that I do not think we should be using the word "talent" in our discourse. These are people who are researchers and who are valuable members of our community. We need to reduce the use of this word. I appreciate the Minister of State is reading from a script. I have mentioned it in the House previously and I want to say again that we should talk about "people" and not "talent". They are talented but I ask that the two words are used differently. --- 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/2026-06-25/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:51+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-25