Professor Patrick P. Walsh:

I am a big fan of the Whitaker-Lemass days. The then Minister had a finance committee made up of Louden Ryan in Trinity as well as the professors of economics in UCD and Queen's University. With the capital programme and economic policies he was tapping in directly to academia. It was a good time for Ireland in many respects. I am romantic about that. I am in favour of anything in the Dáil or the various Departments that puts infrastructure on what I terms our science-policy interface. All that helps with meetings, feedback and consultation. The idea is not to leave out the scientists and the academics. That is a positive move. We are small and we can do it easily. Indeed, we are doing it now, for example.

Reference was made to co-ordination. I am chairman of the Global Association Master's in Development Practice. We have 40 universities throughout the world, including universities in Colombia, Berkeley, Harvard and Tsinghua. We have one in Dublin. The association includes Lund University and Sciences Po. We have associates in Africa and South America as well.

I will explain what are trying to do. It is akin to what the MBA is to business. We are trying to give professional training to young people in order that they can hit the ground running at high level management either in government, private sector or civil society under the SDG agenda. I am keen for every university in Ireland to have a masters in development practice, just as we have masters degrees in economics or finance. We need professionals in this agenda.

Do we co-ordinate properly? Perhaps we do not. The university presidents have the IUA. The association tries to co-ordinate and there are many different aspects to it.

Ronan Murphy has gone from Cork and into a European committee where he is going to try to fight within the European Commission to move the sustainable development goals, SDG, agenda into the mainstream for university funding etc. We compete at a local level for students at undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD level, through the points system, but there is much work to do to orient our universities to the SDG agenda and to have them interface properly with the Dáil, Seanad, the private sector and NGOs. We created a scheme called Collaborative Research Fellowships for a Responsive and Innovative Europe, CAROLINE, with the Irish Research Council. This is for approximately 55 post-doctoral researchers who would work exclusively with universities and NGOs to work better together on implementing SDGs. That is happening in Ireland, which shows a bit of leadership.

There are two challenges. One is that we do not co-ordinate within our own universities and with other universities. There is also the challenge of outreach and better interaction with civil society, Government and the private sector. More important, we should do that in Africa with our partners. There are examples of that happening all the time but it needs to be programmed and more systematic so that it can become something the Irish do well. I gave a keynote speech in Newcastle University and it has the lead on the voluntary national review for the UK for the high-level political forum, HLPF, in 2019. It is in what is called the general assembly. It also has a group, like Coalition 2030, which I think is called SDG coalition and is comprised of civil society groups. It is very keen that Whitehall, together with the civil society groups and a whole-of-Government approach, does something innovative for SDGs and mimics what is in the HLPF in the UN in the UK. This is a great opportunity, irrespective of what is happening with Brexit, to link universities on this global agenda and to work together out in Africa. This is a nice thing that we could do together irrespective of what is happening with the European Union. This is a message I give to them and that they give back to us.

Academia does not have boundaries or border controls. It is one of the most free-moving things one can have although I know it is not easy to get visas for students. In theory, academics and students move very freely between universities and we can use that to address global challenges and work together across our nations and outside Europe. We can work well with the UK's Department for International Trade or UK Aid when we are out in fragile states. That is a nice message in this time when Brexit is happening. Rather than zoning in on the negative things, we can ask what things we can co-operate on irrespective of Brexit. I second the praise of Mr. David Donoghue.