Ms Deirdre Donaghy:

It is a question we ask. As part of the review process, we will ask stakeholders to tell us - to essentially defend why we need to have this credit. When it comes to putting money into the universities, the straightforward thing is if we have €600 million, for example, which is the cost of the credit, then we can spend €600 million as a State to get €600 million worth of work done or we can do €600 million of a tax credit which incentivises €2.4 billion in work to be done because we provide €1 in €4 of that. We do as much as we can to ensure the research and development credit builds those links with the third level institutions and has the spillover effects. It is one of the things we are trying to examine and get more information on in this year's review. From an economics point of view, you can take the numbers and the tax forgone and how much research is done, which are the things that are quantifiable and easy to review. It is much more difficult to try to determine those kind of spillovers but we are asking and if nothing else we will have reported our outcomes.

There are many things happening with the universities in terms of college courses being developed specifically around the types of research and development that are happening here, both in pharma and software, and internships that are sponsored from one to the other. Basically, in order to have the quality of a college course or of a third level course that is bang up to date and really delivering value it helps hugely if you have a real-life industry that is at the cutting edge of research in your jurisdiction and nearby and with a link to that university.