Mr. Jim Miley:

I will come in on the Senator's question on the research side. Our proposal is not that the State does this in isolation by any means. As committee members are aware, our universities and institutes of technology have long and detailed partnerships with industry and access money for research through a variety of mechanisms. One thing we can look at has been striking in recent years.

The Senator is probably aware of the analysis on this issue. In order to qualify for European Research Council, ERC, grants, one needs State support and to be able to show other sources of funding. By not giving certain grants to some of our lead researchers, the State is causing other difficulties for them. It is interesting that some of the people who are featured on television nightly or weekly talking about Covid did not have access to ERC grants in recent years because, in order to qualify, they needed a certain seedbed of State grants to kick them off. It is very much a matched funding model.

To bring this back to the legislation, it is important that the Higher Education Authority would have a pivotal role in setting the ground rules in this area and developing a framework around them. The money is one side of it and the framework through which the money is channelled is the other. It cannot just be about recurrent funding. The infrastructure funding, which the Senator referenced, is critical. We have a situation where, in some higher education institutions, students are being educated and researchers are working in laboratories built in the 1980s and 1990s. That is a real problem when trying to developing industry partnerships. If a third level institution brings in representatives from the local FDI company, they will not want to take a student into their super-high-tech environment who is coming out of that environment. There is a real issue in terms of bridging that gap and the funding needs to address it, both in terms of how it is structured and the quantum of funding.