Mr. Neil Kerrigan:

I thank the Senator for the question. The technology centre is a unique piece of infrastructure. It involves industry working with the State on agreed problems. It is collaboration around agreed problems. We have worked with a number of sectors and construction is one of the sectors that has not had a technology centre. It allows industry, Government and academia to come into one space and look at a prioritised list of challenges. It is a collaborative research challenge for industry and Government, because a large number of Departments work with the sector, and this will facilitate a professional approach to understanding the challenge, getting the best projects set up and the best researchers working on them. For the first time, the construction sector will have that platform.

We use a hosting model. We do not build anything. We have eight technology centres and the construction one will be the ninth such centre. We follow a format where we put out a request to the research providers to say this is an opportunity, that the industry has defined the issues and that we want them, on behalf of the research community, to gather the best people available and bring a proposal back to Enterprise Ireland on behalf of the industry.

That is what happened this year. We put an expression of interest, EOI, out in December to inform the research community that this was coming. We spent a year working with industry and integrating the Housing for All challenges that came out last September into five challenge areas. They are noted in the statement. The research community came together and we received three proposals in February. We internationally reviewed those proposals and were able to bring a decision to the Enterprise Ireland board in April. Because of the urgency of housing, we have taken a year out of the normal procurement process. When I started on this there were three terms, namely, "Very Urgent, "Urgent" and "Short Term". Our chief executive, Leo Clancy, said if we were to do this we needed to do it fast.

We were able to fast-track a procurement process, internationally peer-review it and bring it to our board in April this year. The winner of the competition was announced last week. It is a combination of NUIG, as the host, working with University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and our colleagues on this call, the Irish Green Building Council. The collaborators will work with Galway, Enterprise Ireland and the construction sector group to define the important areas under the five topics that were mentioned and will bring together the best brains, albeit with an industry drive. That is the difference with the technology centre. It is the delivery. The problem is defined as an industrial problem, work is done by the best brains in industry and academia and the result will be delivered faster.

We hope the technology centre will be able to influence the industry and allow policymakers to see how best knowledge is taken. Our colleagues have fantastic information on activities in this space and we hope the technology centre will bring the input of Mr. Barry and the Irish Green Building Council, among others, into play on those five areas. Industry and Government will define what are the most important areas. Housing has taken up a huge input. When we sit down with NUI Galway, as the host, and its collaborators, we will look at the five areas and how to accelerate excellent collaborative, industrial-led research in those areas. Hopefully, we will have outputs in the first six months