Dr. Graham Love:

I thank the Chairman. We accept the point about the paper that was requested by Deputy McDonald and will get to work on that straight away. I will comment on the issue of intellectual property without going into the policy issues. The policy in general is set by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, which partners the Department of Education and Skills and the HEA in the delivery of that within the system. I will not go into all the reasons for that. However, I want to provide assurance that there is a policy and protocol in place, as well as local policies in all the institutions, that is rigorous and which stands up to international standards. We accepted at last week's meeting of this committee, and will recommit to it today, the need to provide assurances that the policy is being implemented and checked on a periodic and acceptable basis. That is something the HEA will perform as part of a rolling review, a governance review. We said that last week and I want to commit to that again today. That will be done in partnership with Knowledge Transfer Ireland, KTI, the expert body. The HEA has governance and accountability relationships with the higher education system. As I said last week and repeat now, we are listening carefully on that front.

I would like to stress something which relates to a point made earlier about Enterprise Ireland and the role of the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. The intention is that the benefits will accrue to Ireland. I think I picked up a concern that there might be a conflict of interest in that, in and of itself. The aim here is to create and retain jobs. I am not going into detail on that but I want to be really clear on that point. I am recommitting to what I said last week, namely, that we will be performing one of our rolling governance reviews on the topic of intellectual property policy implementation in the institutions. We accept the importance of that.