Madam, – Reading the recent correspondence on the subject of postdocs, I find myself in agreement neither with my union nor with my university. Like any senior scientist, I have both been a postdoc and have employed many postdocs.
The fact is that the Irish State and the Irish universities have allowed themselves to get into a mess that is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what postdocs are all about. When postdocs apply to me for a position, this is not because they looking for permanent employment with me, nor with UCD. A postdoc takes a position in order to broaden and enhance their experience and then move on, usually with several more published papers to their name. They might move on to another lab, often in another country, since science is international, or perhaps to a permanent position in academia or industry. If they get stuck in the same place as a postdoc, something has gone badly wrong. To this extent UCD is quite right to see the postdoc as an extension of the training period. What is wrong is the frantic manoeuvring to avoid people claiming permanent employment.
As I understand it, when the relevant European employment legislation came in, most European nations applied for an opt-out in the case of post-doctoral contract workers or grants, but not Ireland, and so we find ourselves in this mess. I might perhaps have grant funding for a person I desperately want and need to keep on for another year or two, and who might want to stay, and yet the university, in order to avoid a claim to permanency, will not allow that person to be re-employed. On the other hand, a postdoc who has managed to secure a contract of indefinite duration may well be foisted on someone who would wish to advertise and employ someone more ideally suited to the task.
There is, of course, an issue about the insecurity of the post-doctoral role. In my generation we just took the risk that we might drop off at the end of the branch but hoped that if we worked hard something good would turn up. That is not ideal. If Ireland wants to provide security for postdocs, then it should do so, not by forcing universities to employ anyone who has done a good job for four years, but rather by creating long-term fellowships that the postdoc can carry to whichever institution he/she wants to work at. In that way the system could operate in the healthy way it should, escaping the present Alice-in-Wonderland paralysis. – Yours, etc,