“I wish I had more time to read,” says Gabriela Lobianco, as she talks about her weekly schedule pursuing a PhD at Cork University Business School, caring for her 10-year-old daughter and juggling a couple of part-time jobs required to make ends meet.

Lobianco estimates work, in its various forms, takes up more than 60 hours a week and squeezes out some of the pleasurable pastimes she used to take for granted.

Originally from São Paulo in Brazil, Lobianco has been in Ireland 19 years. During that time she has become an Irish citizen, married and divorced, and worked for a string of well-known multinationals prior to taking redundancy last year and deciding to develop a master’s she did while still working at Dell into a PhD.

“I have a different experience to many of my peers because I had an established career, but one where I wasn’t getting the raises I needed. I owned my own house but I got divorced, sold my house and got redundant. I’m a different thing, but at the end of the day, I am in the same shoes as the others … I cannot afford my life only by studying.”

The subject of Lobianco’s master’s is one that is close to her heart: the experiences of migrant women in employment. She is grateful for the funding that has enabled her to do more work on the subject but her budget is stretched.

She describes herself as “very lucky” to have a house in Ballincolig for herself and her daughter, for €1,500 a month. However, her annual stipend is €22,000 and so she undertakes additional work at the university, and some freelance translation work to pay for utilities, food and other day-to-day expenses.

Her total income, she estimates, is about €3,000 per month and, she says: “I’m short every month, with the redundancy really covering the rest.”

The Postgraduate Workers’ Organisation (PWO), formed to represent PhD researchers, or students – a key distinction in the debate over terms and conditions – says many of the challenges Lobianco faces are commonplace for the roughly 6,000 PhD candidates at universities around the State.

Most are now on €25,000 per year, which would have sounded like good money to Cathal O’Faoláin, from Cabinteely in Dublin, a couple of years ago but which, at 24 and watching his friends all move into new phases of their lives, now feels limiting.

O’Faoláin is at UCD, where much of the work in the unit where he is based is in the area of AI speech and audio systems. His project, he hopes, could improve the lives of people with dysarthria, or slurred speech. It is potentially significant and very real work, he says, feeding into major industries that generate enormous amounts of money, but it doesn’t pay him even close to enough to being able to move out of his parental home.

Like Lobianco, he tops up his stipend, €25,000 in his case, with other work in the college which brings him in about another €3,000. Friends who left for jobs in the tech and AI sectors after completing their master’s degrees often earn three to four times as much, he says.

“It’s an insane difference,” he says. “I’ll go out with them, and it’s like I’m living a completely different life. I want to be kind of a normal adult, have autonomy, be in a position to move out but I currently can’t because of my economic situation.

“Financially, I can’t really take care of myself,” he says, “and I certainly couldn’t take care of anybody else.”

Recent Higher Education Authority research, based on CSO data, suggests he should be all right in the end. It pointed to very high levels of employment for PhD graduates, with a 40 per cent earnings premium over honours primary degree holders and an almost 30 per cent one over those with a master’s.

Ó Faolain accepts he is likely to have good options in a few years but suggests the system still fails to place proper value on the work being done by PhD candidates at present.

Astrid Dedieu, from southwest France, is working at University College Cork on research into the impacts of offshore energy generation on seabirds.

Now entering the fourth and final year of her PhD, Dedieu has, she says, felt the benefit of increases to her stipend, which was originally €18,500 a year before being increased to €25,000. She says student status brings some free medical benefits and access to a gym but “not much else”.

“In France, you’re considered as a worker; you’re on a working contract. The salary would have been lower but the cost of living is lower too and you would have unemployment benefits, housing benefits. When I talk about those things here, people don’t even believe me.”

Dedieu, who pays €720 in rent per month plus bills, finds living in Cork tight financially but manageable.

Despite the financial challenges Dedieu is, she says, doing work she loves and feels “very lucky. I feel like the whole of my research group is amazing professionally. This opportunity is the best that I could have hoped for.”

Still, the employment status issue rankles, she says. “I don’t want to say it’s degrading but it definitely doesn’t make us feel as appreciated as we probably should be, as appreciated as PhDs are in other countries in Europe. I think there’s still a bit of work to be done.”

Dr Lisa Keating, director of research and innovation at the Irish Universities Association, says: “We told Government we needed €11.6 million to raise the stipends to €25,000 and we didn’t get anything.”

Though there are many funding strands and ongoing differences between the terms attached to them, the majority of PhD candidates are now paid the €25,000 recommended in a Government-backed 2023 report and universities have had to find a lot of their share of the money out of existing budgets, she says.

The wider problem, she suggests, is underinvestment in third level generally and research in particular, with 0.9 per cent of Government spending going to the sector compared to an EU average of 1.49 per cent – a difference, she says, of €700 million.

Like Ibec, in its Our Innovation Ambition document published this week, she suggests the Government’s level of investment falls well short of its persistent talk about creating a “knowledge economy”.

Dublin City University’s vice-president for research, Prof John Doyle, accuses some advocates for PhD students, as he refers to them, of pretending there is “magic money” somewhere that would allow universities to improve conditions without a substantial increase in Government support.

“Is €25,000 enough to live on in Dublin? No. But there’s no recognition that we have moved a long way.”

And constraints on funding, he suggests, mean a choice between PhD numbers and levels of support available to candidates when many more are required “because we need to look to what’s going to be the next thing after Intel and pharma, where we are going to be in 10 years’ time”.

He and the Postgraduate Workers’ Organisation disagree on a fair bit, but not that, it seems. PWO Committee member Jack McNicholl is adamant it shouldn’t be a choice between more respect and more research.

“We would absolutely want big policy changes to be accompanied by increases in funding,” he says. “As it is, the model is simply unsustainable.”

Hamza – not his real name because he says he is concerned he may be targeted for racist abuse online – came to Ireland from Pakistan, and makes it clear from the outset he is grateful to be here.

At 39, he had already earned three master’s degrees at home, also in the computer science area and had years of academic work under his belt, but the €2,000 a month stipend that came with the PhD he applied for was well above what he earned in Islamabad. What he did not fully appreciate was that he would find the cost of living here so high.

Initially he lived close to the Dublin university where he worked and additional hours as a research assistant allowed him to cover his rent, live and send some money home.

When his wife and four children were permitted to join him, however, his accommodation costs increased and he is about to move to Athy, Co Kildare, where he has secured a house for €2,200 a month, slightly more than his core role earns him.

“If I convert the amount I get into Pakistani rupees, it is much better than my salary in Pakistan. But since I moved here, I now know the expenses are too much,” he says.

As he holds a Stamp 2 permit, essentially a student visa, his wife will not be allowed to work – a restriction specifically addressed by employer body Ibec in a policy document on the promotion of innovation published this week – and the four years he spends working towards the PhD will not count as residency for citizenship purposes.

He does not qualify for state benefits such as children’s allowance and he has not been able to avail of the Government’s cost rental accommodation scheme.

The stipend, he says, makes life “liveable” but being classed as a student rather than a worker – a key issue for many PhD candidates – makes things very challenging, he says.

“It is very difficult to see my future. I’m classed as a PhD student but I’m not an ordinary student. We would like to consider staying in Ireland – it has supported me in this role and I would like to repay the debt – but it takes a long time to get citizenship and I am nearly 40 so it is difficult to decide.”

A spokesman for Minister for Higher Education James Lawless said he is “committed to supporting the research landscape in Ireland”.

He announced a €17.7 million investment in nine research infrastructure projects through Research Ireland’s Research Infrastructure Programme, the spokesman said.

He said of the PhD students who enrol annually in Ireland, “in the region of 3,000 receive stipend awards from Research Ireland and approximately 1,000 do so from other public funders. Roughly 2,000 receive some level of institutional scholarship support from their host higher education institution, with the assistance of core funding from the Higher Education Authority”. The remainder are privately funded, either by the individual or their employer.

“In the last three budgets, the Government has increased core funding to higher education institutions by €164.4m, with a commitment to provide a further €100m in core funding by 2029. The additional funding has enabled an increase in core staffing numbers for the higher education sector of some 4,300 additional posts since 2020," the spokesman added.

Source: The Irish Times.