Dr. Michael Mulvey:

We made a comprehensive submission. I will speak about five points within it. We have also included a series of requests. I will not speak about them all but they are there for the committee and I am happy to take questions about them. I will speak about our location, students and staff, enterprise and innovation and research and the technological university. We have a terrific location on the M1 economic corridor. Some 3.3 million people are located within a 90-minute drive of us. We are at the centre of what could be called the multi-polar city of Drogheda, Dundalk and Newry, serving a catchment area in Armagh, County Down, Louth, Meath, Cavan and Monaghan.

This puts us in a pivotal position to interact with universities in Belfast and Dublin, and also very much with our further education colleagues both North and South, the ETBs in the South and the regional colleges in Northern Ireland. We are also well-placed to benefit from PEACE PLUS funding which we can access for advancing research, innovation, knowledge cluster development, infrastructure and the climate agenda and to address disadvantaged communities.

In terms of students and staff, 52 members of staff cross the Border. I was going to say that they cross the Border every day. They were crossing the Border every day and hopefully will go back to doing so in the future when we get away from the pandemic remote learning. We have made a particular point of increasing undergraduate recruitment from Northern Ireland over the last number of years. We are experiencing steady progress and a steady upward trajectory in terms of our enrolments. However, there are some barriers in relation to the timing of offers, which arises from the differences between the UCAS and the CAO system in the Republic and the processing of particular types of non-A level qualifications. We have noticed a greater level of queries about the portability of qualifications to be gained in the South following Brexit. Therefore, more promotion around the national qualifications framework would be helpful in that regard. Continued assurance about the stability of the fees regime, specifically, that Northern Ireland students will continue to benefit from the same regime of fees as experienced by Republic of Ireland students is particularly important.

In relation to enterprise and innovation, we are extremely active in that regard. I will touch on a number of points. We have recently developed a corporate partnership development programme which is a key strategic initiative aimed at providing a structured framework for the institute to work with high-profile organisations across industry, community and professions in the region. We work with clusters of energy companies, fintech and engineering companies. We recently collaborated with our neighbour across the Border, the Southern Regional College, on a Brexit research study project conducted by students from each institute, addressing the issues faced by small businesses caused by Brexit. We had a joint submission to InterTradeIreland to fund a pilot concept supporting student enterprise and innovation in the north east. That has been put on hold but, hopefully, with the easing of restrictions we can revisit that next year.

The institute is very active in fusion projects, assisting industry. We conduct, on average, six fusion projects per annum. We have conducted 78 to date and we have won a number of prizes in that regard. We are active in the InterTradeIreland EU-funded cross-Border co-innovate programme with ten projects currently under way, focused particularly on engineering and the schools of mathematics and creative arts. The regional development centre has assisted more than 200 knowledge-based start-up companies. We have assisted 1,600 entrepreneurs and conducted 326 applied research projects. We are very active in cross-Border research. We are a lead partner in a major heart disease programme with Queen's University and a renewable energy project with the University of Ulster, among others. We have a number of asks in that regard, which we can discuss in the questions.

Finally, on the issue of technological university designation, I took the liberty of submitting our vision to become a multi-campus regional technological university. We would be grateful for the support and endorsement of this committee. We would appreciate it. It would allow us to continue our important work in enhancing cross-Border flows of students, assisting cross-Border industry and, indeed, cross-Border communities even more effectively.