Professor Jane Ohlmeyer:

I wish to respond to the fees issue as raised by Deputy Thomas Byrne and Senator Lynn Ruane. The reality we are facing is that a student from the South who is studying in the North will be treated as non-EU and vice versa. That prospect fills me with horror because the non-EU fee is between three to five times greater than the EU fee. This is where the Government could be helpful in really trying to ensure that at least on the island of Ireland there is a single fee for students studying in Belfast or Dublin. That would be a really helpful thing to do. Ideally, we would want it to be east, west as well as North, South but we will have to work very hard to achieve that.

On the point made by Deputy Carol Nolan about the possibility of a special provision for researchers in the North, it should be noted that the Irish Research Council currently funds students on a pan-island basis. We would intend to continue that, come what may. Ideally, we would want to continue to fund students coming from the UK as well. A lot of our money goes into early career researchers, that is, PhD students and post-doctoral students. We feed the talent pipeline and would like that to continue, subject to an adequate budget being in place and certainly North-South, that has to be a priority for us.

On Senator Gallagher's question of whether we speak with one voice, sadly the answer is "No". The Senator also asked whether there is a mechanism allowing the sector to speak with one voice but I am not aware of one. What I am aware of is the fact that there are conversations going on in the Department of Education and Skills, the Higher Education Authority, the Irish Universities Association and elsewhere. The Royal Irish Academy has just established two Brexit committees. I am chairing the one for the South and there is another one in the North. We have a proliferation of people thinking about this and we are all coming to the same conclusion. Having a mechanism to bring all of these voices together would be extremely helpful because on this occasion, everyone wants the same thing. In that way, we could influence policy makers here and in Brussels. We must be very cognisant of the importance of making our case to our European colleagues. Anything that allows us to speak with one voice at a policy level would be extremely valuable.