Dr. Paul Conway:

Professor Fitzpatrick's point about the potential contribution of the third level sector in Ireland and internationally to understand and to engage with development has been one of the significant areas of change in the past decade. There has been a coming together of development workers and the international third level sector. This has been supported in Ireland through the work of Irish Aid and the programme for strategic co-operation which is now in its third phase. I refer to one project as an example. The Irish-African partnership for research capacity-building was the first project involving all nine universities on the island of Ireland, both North and South. The project looked at building research capacity in Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda. UCC was a partner in that project. It included Irish universities from North and South working with universities in those four countries. It was a very significant project for understanding the complexity of research capacity-building in very diverse national and university contexts. For example, it involved interviewing 300 mainly senior and mid-level academics across the 13 to 14 universities involved in the project which helped significantly to understand the challenges of promoting that joined-up thinking. Projects with Irish Aid funding can provide the context for colleagues across Irish universities to begin to understand development in new ways and also to consider how academics across universities may work together. Professor Tony Ryan referred to the Esther network which provides support at the level of the individual institution, as does our centre for global development. It is important to provide cross-institutional support by fostering the links across institutions, such as hospital to hospital or university to university. This has been a very valuable global development in the past decade.