It’s the time of the year again when candidates from around the world will be accepting offers to pursue a PhD at Irish universities. At the same time, Minister for Further and Higher Education James Lawless wants to offer Ireland as “a welcoming host for the best and the brightest” researchers fleeing the US university system.
Reports this week revealed that the Trump administration has ordered a pause on new appointments for international student and exchange visitor visa applicants, which may encourage more candidates to look towards Ireland.
But as PhD researchers in Ireland, we have some advice: do not come to Ireland for a PhD, unless you enjoy grappling with a long list of injustices.
The idea to go public with this message emerged from members of the Postgraduate Workers’ Organisation (PWO), which was born out of a need for a union to directly deal with the challenges faced by PhD researchers. We know that by writing this, we face possible consequences for our career paths. That is why not all of those who have been involved in shaping the argument presented here are able to have their names attached to it.
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As of this year, a stipend of €25,000 per annum is the most that any PhD researcher in Ireland makes. It is below the minimum wage of €27,378 and far below the living wage of €29,913. Some of us started our PhD at an abysmal stipend of €16,500. But this recent increase is not uniform: while some universities have raised it for their internal scholarships, others have remained silent. Some other funders have promised to match the increase, but this has been extremely inconsistent and unreliable: only last month the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland confirmed the delivery and backpayment of the increase it promised at the start of 2024, after 15 months of delay.
Meanwhile, some of us are completely unpaid and self-funded, and some are on exploitative contracts that include both full-time teaching and research responsibilities for stipends as low as €10,000 per annum.
Many researchers from outside the EU choose to come to Ireland on such paltry stipends without knowing the extent of the housing crisis here, the inability of universities to provide adequate housing, and often the lack of sufficient funds to conduct our research.
Non-EU researchers are subject to much higher costs, including the annual fee of €300 towards renewing our Irish residence permit and mandatory private insurance. No other country in the EU requires a PhD researcher to pay such a high fee for a residence permit. Additionally, non-EU researchers face high costs and barriers when it comes to conference travel and the relocation of their spouses to Ireland.
These injustices are not simply the outcome of bad policy, but are rather part of a model being set by the Irish higher education system. There is a clear, if never directly stated, agenda to abandon the idea of higher education as a public good and move towards a business model; PhD researchers, especially those from outside the EU, are at the coalface of this movement.
The strategic plan of Irish universities is to increase research output and attract more international (read non-EU) PhD researchers, but these documents lack any mention of an increase in funding to support this. Given that it is much more difficult for non-EU researchers to access Research Ireland funding, many of these may be “self-funded”. This can only mean one thing: universities are moving towards an extractive research model, aiming to exploit non-EU researchers both through their unpaid labour and by relying on their extortionate fees to help balance the books.
But can universities afford to pay for the labour that sustains them?
Rather than providing a public service in the form of teaching and research, universities are increasingly run like businesses, trying to balance the books
Despite them constantly citing a lack of funds, we know that many of our institutions are running budget surpluses and are not acting so frugally in other areas. Dublin City University made a profit of €5 million from student beds in 2022, the Business Post reported. The University of Limerick was recently engulfed in controversy over a €5.2m overspend on the purchase of new student accommodation. Maynooth University last year issued a €500,000 tender for a taxi service with “no wait time” for “priority passengers” including “a number of the university’s staff”. This was only slightly more than the whopper amount spent by the University of Galway in its 2023 rebrand. Like with many systemic injustices in this country, the issue is not a lack of resources, but political decisions about how to distribute them.
Rather than providing a public service in the form of teaching and research, universities are increasingly run like businesses, trying to balance the books and bring in external funding at every opportunity. This means less public funding for a diverse set of research, more research directed and funded by private industry, and an increase in PhD candidates from outside the EU, who, instead of being paid for their work, will be charged extortionate fees to “study” here.
This also means that underpaid PhD researchers have to teach undergraduate courses: our plight, hence, is tied to the quality of education we are able to provide in classrooms. The Irish Government is keen on positioning itself as the next best destination for higher education, academic excellence and innovation, especially in response to turmoil in US academic institutions. But how long can that reputation be sustained given the treatment of international PhD researchers?
The PWO has been consistently advocating for an employment model of PhD research. Plenty of examples of this exist across the EU. Why would you do your PhD in Ireland when you can get decent pay, working conditions and dignity as a researcher in Germany or Sweden? In countries like Austria, the Netherlands and Sweden, PhD researchers pay taxes and have the right to unionise, and these countries also score better than Ireland across innovation indices. Clearly, treating PhD researchers as workers leads to better outcomes.
The fact that the number of non-EU PhD candidates across all institutions in the last academic year was 3,300, more than half the number of domestic candidates, says a lot about how Irish higher education relies heavily on their exploitation, and all indications are that this model is being expanded.*
We should not be misleading candidates about PhD life in Ireland. It is short-sighted for the Irish higher education system to exploit PhD researchers, who will surely head out the door as soon as they have their degree. Until the education system reflects how it treats PhD researchers, we will keep telling everyone: do not come to Ireland for a PhD.
Criostóir King, Luke Mac Carthaigh and Beatriz Carazo del Hoyo are members of the Postgraduate Workers’ Organisation
*This article was amended on May 30th 2025 to correct an error. An earlier version stated that the majority of PhD candidates across all universities are non-EU.
