Dr. Jennifer Brennan:

I thank Senator Byrne for his questions and it is good to see him again.

On Horizon Europe, which is a real opportunity for Ireland, we have to be very careful to remember that EU funding is meant to be the icing on the cake and is not meant to replace national investment. Our colleagues from the Irish Universities Association, IUA, alluded to the underinvestment in research that is happening in Ireland. This hampers our ability to be able to compete in these programmes.

One of the things which we have not done in the past which we should probably take more advantage of is the ability to match different EU funds together. It is possible to take EU Structural Funds and Horizon Europe funds, for example, together and use them to fund different of projects, which is something that we have never really done in Ireland. There are some particular investments around things like what are called the seal of excellence, where a project is deemed to be fundable at European level but there may not be sufficient budget there for it and it can then be funded at national level, if such funds at national level can be found to do so.

Having the UK in Horizon Europe is something of a double-edged sword because while it allows us to still collaborate with it on the big programmes, which is great, and the UK still has some of our top collaborators in Europe, we also talked about trying to increase and attract talent here which we have lost, in a way, now. People can still, however, apply for big European Research Council grants and for Marie Skodowska-Curie fellowships with the UK, and it is the most popular country still for those particular programmes.

I will, of course, say being a representative from institutes of technology which are all looking to become technological universities, that the technological universities are a real asset to Ireland and we really appreciate the funding that has been put in so far to build up their research and innovation capacity. We have already seen a 50% increase in EU funding coming into our sector, compared with the Seventh Framework Programme up to Horizon 2020, and we could see a much bigger increase in that if we increase investment. Overall, we need to increase our investment nationally, particularly in infrastructure and attracting talent. The national development plan review is a very good opportunity for this and we, of course, look forward to the new research and innovation strategy. As we get better as a country in research and innovation, we will only see a knock-on improvement in our ability to be able to compete in Horizon Europe and in the other EU funds. We cannot continue doing more with less or to increase our performance if we do not have that underlying investment at national level.