Mr. Ned Costello:

We will come back on some of Deputy McConalogue's other questions as I am sure Mr. Lewis Purser and my other colleague will want to talk on them as well.

On the issue of pay, let me revert to what I said in my opening statement. Benchmarking increased average levels of pay and they are now higher. The level of pay increased across the board, and universities did not get to determine those levels. Research is the one area in which pay is not determined centrally. We have been trying to find out by internal research about pay practice as well as pay levels. We have international contacts in countries such as Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. These countries are not picked at random but are our labour market and the countries in which we compete for staff. It is clear from these countries that once one gets to professorial level, the norm is that universities and institutions set their own pay levels. We do not have physical evidence but we know they can pay what they want and pay very high levels, well in excess of what would be paid in Ireland for the very best people.

I have one statistic on entry level pay from the United Kingdom. Prior to the cuts, our entry level pay would have been competitive for two reasons, first, because the entry rate of pay was okay in the first place and, second, there was flexibility on the point of the scale at which one would appoint a new lecturer. Now that we have got the 10% reduction and are restricted to appointing staff to the first point on the scale, because of the level of published information in the UK about pay, we have done a purchasing power parity calculation. The starting salary in Ireland on a purchasing power parity basis would be $40,000, whereas in the UK it is $43,000. It is below but not massively below the UK rate at the entry level. At the upper level, it is virtually impossible to get figures because each individual institution can effectively pay what it wants. We know there are certain other benefit packages that international institutions will offer such as houses, access to laboratories, the building of facilities for star researchers and so on. They can throw these things into the mix in a way that we cannot.