Dr. Kieran Harkin:

I thank Deputy Durkan for his contribution and I agree with everything that he said. He is right that it is more difficult to see what to do at a national level. Recently the Dutch authorities commissioned a report to assess what they could do at a local level and came up with a number of interesting things. One is that they discovered they were funding research but just at the point when it might become commercially available, it was being handed up and the industry was taking it for a song. They discovered that if they invested just a little more and went one step further in the research to package it to be more commercially viable, then they would get much more value for money. They recommended in their report that a clause be inserted to ensure there is subsequent public input into price control down the line on research using government funding. This committee might usefully explore some options that we could use at a national level to reform the system.