Dr. Michael Mulvey:

I will return to Senator Byrne's question and will then hand over to my colleague, Dr. Flanagan, in a moment.

A dedicated fund, for instance, to drive research collaborations between universities, North and South, would be very welcome for a Border college like ourselves. Likewise, funding to allow a college to attract or to second leading researchers from Northern Ireland universities would help drive collaboration between ourselves and universities in the North and allow research leaders from Queens University Belfast and the University of Ulster to apply for European Union Horizon funding.

My other point is that a dedicated funding scheme was tried by us in a very small way to have research placements for A-level students within Northern Ireland and our region to undertake research projects within the college. This would attract students to the South and into our institutes.

Addressing Senator Byrne, the shared island funding seems to be very heavily driven towards infrastructure and consideration should be given to the funding of shared facilities that would be shared, North and South, through the putting in place of the relevant governance and regulatory instruments to effect that. This works very well in the area of health and there is no reason it should not work in education.

Through the Chair, I will ask my colleague, Dr. Flanagan, to reply with some points to Senator Byrne’s questions.