Professor Peter Clinch:

I will start with the Deputy's first question. As an organisation, SFI's main role is to disseminate funding in order to encourage the development of science. However, it also has some very important programmes of outreach to inform public engagement in science, reach out to schools and engage in the area of gender. This will be a focus for me. The Deputy is correct that, as a fairly young organisation in the context of enterprise agencies, SFI still has a way to go in reaching out to the public. All of its programmes require a dissemination plan. At individual project level, there is a significant effort by the organisation to ensure greater impact so it is research excellence with impact and greater clarity around the impact agenda. The universities and higher education institutions are aware that they also need to demonstrate impact. There is also a role for the board and executive in being very clear how SFI contributes, as I have explained, to economic and social development. I hope I have set that out at this meeting and it will certainly be very high on my agenda. It was the first of my bullet points on what I believe needs to be done.

I set out the priorities for SFI in my opening statement so I will not repeat the ten main areas. One of the priorities is for the organisation to continue to support the very strong research base. I am joining the board as the strategy is developing and it is clear Ireland still as some way to go in moving towards this innovation frontier. We are still a follower, although I would describe us as being probably top of the pack of followers.

At the same time, I aim to ensure the organisation addresses some of the major societal challenges such as climate change and artificial intelligence, to which I referred. We will also engage in ongoing horizon scanning to ensure we are investing in the right areas. The strategy will continue to focus on developing the highly skilled talent pool and a very balanced portfolio of research. We will also focus on working across the ecosystem to deliver on that.

To be more specific, it is important to have a balance across the two main areas of funding and continuing to develop capacity through the research centres. These are large-scale collaborative centres involving industry and multiple institutions. We will continue to invest in those and secure that critical mass while, at the same time, developing the pipeline of new researchers and new ideas coming forward. The idea is to have bottom-up proposals, in other words, researchers coming forward with their proposals and open calls, and also to have a top-down approach where the Government or SFI identifies the need to build scale. Individual researchers across the career spectrum, from early stage to established highly esteemed individual research leaders, will be supported. There will be support for research teams in large-scale or leading SFI research centres. This will involve focusing on thematic areas of research we already have, namely, pharmaceutical, software, digital content, big data, telecommunications, photonics, medical devices, nanotechnology, marine and renewable energy, functional foods, applied geosciences, agrifood, advanced and smart manufacturing, neurological diseases, and the bio-economy.

The focus will continue to be on excellence. Even if something is a great idea and a great challenge, we need to make sure that we are funding excellence. This will continue. We will not fund something just because we feel it needs to be funded.