Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is not as much as we anecdotally hear and I will provide some figures. Funding for basic research comes from many sources, including through the block grant from the Department of Education and Skills through the Higher Education Authority. That source provides about €190 million. The latest figures available to me show that for the academic year 2012-13 a little more than half of the total higher education research and development budget was on basic research, showing little change on previous years. SFI estimates that more than 80% of its funding of its portfolio of active research awards is for oriented basic scientific research, which takes place before the point of any type of commercialisation.

Senator Reilly asked about the reduction in programme B. In 2015, provision for programme B innovation was under €320 million. It was supplemented with an additional €25.5 million in capital, which was front-loaded, made available by way of a Supplementary Estimate last December. This additional money allowed our research funding agencies to meet certain costs in 2015 that otherwise would have arisen in 2016.

In doing so, the accelerated payments in late 2015 allowed us to arrive at the 2016 capital provision for innovation of €307 million. It is worth noting that, between 2015 and 2016, the average capital budget for innovation was €329 million, a significant increase over the 2014 figure of €292 million.