Ms Marian Duggan:

The technological sector has been the poor cousin in the context of securing funding from a research and innovation perspective. Our allocation has been a static amount of €5 million since 2019. We are asking that to be increased to 5% of the recurrent grant in the first place and then to bring it up to 10%, which our colleagues in the university sector get. We are asking for parity of esteem in the university sector and in terms of the allocation of funding to it.

The technological university sector is engaged in applied research and it engages with local industry, which fuels regional development. We have proven ourselves in this respect and we want the opportunity to expand on that. We are hamstrung in the sense that we are coming from a small base. If that was increased it would allow us to do more regional development work in our applied research with local industry.