Professor Alan Barrett:

The astute thing for me to do would be to send the Deputy our boring old publications policy that would give him a sense of how we do things but I want to explain it in a much better way. I had the following conversation with somebody from the Department of Social Protection who once attended one of our review meetings; I will not name the person. She said she was absolutely amazed at how robust the discussion was over a piece of work. I refer to a situation where a researcher has produced a piece of work that has really been kicked around and asked to justify the conclusions reached. The Department had funded the work and one of its officials attended the refereeing meeting. She commented on how robust the debate was. She then assumed that half of the group would not talk to the other as they left the meeting but realised that everybody went to coffee together. Robust debate is considered part of one's role in the institute. I often say that the people who work in the institute have a role to play in terms of writing the reports but they also have the important role of commenting on other people's reports. I shall outline one of the areas where this arises, and I may meander ever so slightly. People say that the ESRI could be run virtually, that we do not need to have an office and everybody could work in their own office but send their work in. However, another important dimension of the ESRI is its ability to have a collection of people who work together, interrogate people's work and feed off one another.