Professor Cathal O'Donoghue:

Teagasc is an applied research and knowledge transfer in education agency primarily focusing on agriculture and the food sector. We have 43,000 fee paying clients and hundreds of food businesses, both SME and large, who are clients. The research and the activities we undertake follow very much what the industry is looking for. We are not just followers, we also try to lead the industry as a development agency. Members of the board are members of the industry. We have stakeholder committees in each of the commodity areas and that defines our programme each year. We are strongly imbedded within the industry with a very practical and applied focus. In terms of our science, really high quality science, we would be comparable to the universities in terms of quality but we work in a narrow area in a specific industry.