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

I welcome the delegation. It is great to have them before the committee today. I thank Professor McNulty for a very comprehensive overview of CERN and the benefits membership would bring. I was fortunate enough to travel to CERN with Professor McNulty earlier this year. We had a very productive two days meeting with the academics, researchers and technicians there. I certainly learned an awful lot more about it from that occasion than I knew previously. I also acknowledge Professor Emmanuel Tsesmelis, who came from CERN to Dublin and met with Professor McNulty and me this summer to explore the case for Irish membership.

Professor McNulty has clearly and powerfully outlined the many benefits of Irish membership. He has covered the underlying strands and has cast quite a wide arc. One thing I had not appreciated that struck me on-site at CERN was the breadth of activities. We talk about particle physics and of course that is core to it, but there is also everything from big data to electronics, semiconductors, software services, hardware services, data management, pipelining and high-performance computing. Such a range of activities take place, each of which is a spin-off field of its own and creates opportunities of its own. Irish researchers, academics and workers could be to the fore of all of them if we joined the organisation. That is another strong case to be made.

As mentioned it in Professor McNulty's presentation, the reputational effect is also important. Everyone on the committee should have a look at the map showing who is and is not a member of CERN. It shocked me. As professor McNulty has outlined, there are only three European Union states that are not CERN members; Moldova, Bosnia and ourselves. The members include countries that are sometimes considered to be less developed than Ireland. There are members or associate members across the world, including the developing word. That is quite stark. It is something that we need to address post haste.

The case nearly makes itself. As Professor McNulty has said, it is relevant to the knowledge economy. I refer to the economic strategy we have pursued since the days of Thomas Kenneth Whitaker and Seán Lemass, based on investment in education and opportunity and building a skill set to compete at that level. We know that older industries and manufacturing have gone away. Joining CERN ties into the knowledge economy-based intellectual capital that we have been trying to nurture for 40 years. It is a continuation of that and makes a lot of sense given everything else we are trying to do.

I have two questions. It is important to get the answers on record to understand and tease these issues out. The first question is the cost. This came up as recently as the budget last week, during which CERN was discussed. I made representations, as did others, and had discussions with the relevant Minister. The cost was cited as an obstacle. As I understand it, there are a couple of different price tags. One can go high or low, depending on one's level of readiness. For €1.3 million we can get most of the benefits. It is my understanding that there is no commitment or timeline. We could join at the base level and stay there for as long as we wished, for five or ten years.