Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will make one other point. In the higher education sector in this country we hold an awful lot of intellectual property rights. In some cases the property is patent-protected; in some cases it is not. Commercial companies may be sought to come in to assist. They might look at the IP in the context of commercialisation and see how that might be rolled out. The first question becomes patenting, the cost and the protection and whether one's rights can be enforced. For a lot of countries, including Ireland, as Mr. Gaffney said, this is a global business. Smaller SMEs will not go to China. They cannot. It is very expensive to litigate in the US and very difficult to enforce one's rights, so smaller companies end up having to partner with bigger ones, probably multinationals. They can fight that space.

There is a significant benefit to Ireland of the IP we hold within higher education. I do not think Mr. Gaffney referred to this in his opening statement but I am sure IBEC is well aware of it. I would like to see some coalescing of IBEC's strategy with higher education in understanding that we have an awful lot of IP that could be expressed commercially but has to be safeguarded in the first instance. I do not even know if we have a good repository in this country to understand how many European patents we have sitting in abeyance. As the witnesses will know, they have to be removed every number of years, and that costs money. There is a body of work to be done on that.

As Deputy Stanton said, this is a very important topic for the committee. We absolutely need to speak to the Department and to ask that what IBEC is asking to be expedited is expedited and that we try to get this matter to a referendum as quickly as possible, get legislation through and get it decided on. I think my time is up, more or less.