In the Dark

I thought I’d use the medium of this blog to share a petition aimed at increasing the stipends of PhD students in Ireland. The background to this petition, described on this blog here, is that in June the Government of Ireland introduced a new scheme in which a select group of students would receive a stipend of €28k per annum for PhD. The justification for this amount from the Government itself is that it corresponds to an appropriate level of paper. It seems to me to be entirely logical that if this is the appropriate level of pay, then all PhD stipends should be increased to this level with immediate effect.

As the petition site says:

We maintain that the current PhD stipend is insufficient on several accounts. All of Ireland, especially Dublin, has a cost of living crisis driven by increasing rents and rising inflation. The costs are even higher for non-EU researchers, who have to pay for health insurance and residence permits each year.

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) reported an approximate 9.1% inflation of prices1 in the last year, which means that the current (average) stipend of €18.5k has the same purchasing power as a €17k stipend pre-inflation, when current first-year PhD researchers accepted their roles.

I hope that not only other PhD students and academic staff at Maynooth and beyond will sign this petition. It is particularly important for the we academic staff to show solidarity with research students as we head into a possible industrial dispute ourselves.

You can find the petition here.

This entry was posted on August 30, 2022 at 9:55 am and is filed under Maynooth with tags Fair Pay, PhD stipends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.