James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his presentation and the enthusiasm he shows for his brief. We have worked together and his passion for it shows in his statements. However, the nature of this type of scrutiny means we will focus on the gaps rather than what is working. I hope he will indulge me in this regard.

I was at the Tyndall National Institute this morning. I was delighted to hear extra funding will be made available to it. One of the items mentioned to me there was the need for extra capital expenditure. I also visited the APC Microbiome Institute, another fantastic research centre with Professor Fergus Shanahan and his team. These are leading examples of what we are doing with some of the funds available.

The Minister of State claimed Ireland was in the top ten in maths and chemistry internationally. Trinity College's maths department did not qualify for SFI funding recently, however. There are issues in this regard and how these allocations are made. Trinity's maths department is a leader in all sorts of fields. Due to quirks in the prioritisation, the department did not qualify and several projects were affected.

In 2017, €26 million in PRTLI funding was carried over and in 2018, €14 million. Every university and research institute has the same challenge when it comes to bricks and mortar funding. There is a need for a fund dedicated towards buildings, labs, libraries and procuring equipment such as spectrometers, expensive pieces of kit which become obsolete quite quickly because of the nature of scientific advancement. A significant tranche of money has not been put into PRTLI since round five expired in 2016. In 2007, when PRTLI round four was announced, the funding stood at €230 million. In 2010, at a time when we were not booming economically, the then Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, announced a €359 million fund to run to 2016. Since 2016, however, only €26 million and €14 million have been allocated. The sums involved now are paltry compared with what used to be involved.

Since the start of 2016 and essentially since the new Administration, we have had a trickle. We had a river and now it has gone to a trickle. That is having an impact on the universities and research institutes. They cannot buy a new library or laboratory. They cannot buy a new spectrometer if the old one is ten years old and obsolete. Is there a plan to address that? Will there be a sixth round of the PRTLI? Will it be a bricks-and-mortar fund? Will it be of significant impact, because €40 million is better than zero but it is a hell of a long way from €359 million and the hundreds of millions in funds that were there for the previous 15 years. What is happening next with the PRTLI?