Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Acting Chairman has pronounced it better than most people within my own family and I thank her very much. I also thank the witnesses for their presentations which have been very informative. Something that comes across again and again is how we measure value and worth and how perhaps a monetary definition of how we measure value does not do a great job in what we are looking for.

I want to afford the witnesses some latitude to expand on what they laid out because I realise that a three-minute presentation is a very tight timeframe within which to get things across.

I ask Ms Donegan first of all to dig down into that differentiation between the primary and applied research. Perhaps this is a very simplistic synopsis on my part but traditionally we would have relied upon the universities for the former, and the IOTs or the new TU structures for the latter. Can she perhaps develop that, please? Can she also dig down into the idea of how precarious the research job is at the moment? There is a real issue there particularly around primary research which may not always be directly marketable, as it were, and may be difficult to attract funding for. I used to research medieval English which was not the most close-to-market field in the entire world.

Building on that I will turn to Ms Dolan and give her more time to talk about the role of the TU and how this role differs from universities proper within this Higher Education Authority Bill and I will leave my questions at that to allow for answers.