Professor James Gleeson:

To go back to the point about graduate placements that Ms McGee made so well, they are really important for innovation. PhD students are the driver in these workplace programmes, one of which is the centre that I co-run with my colleagues in UCD and Maynooth. We have a mandatory 12-week placement for all the students, so they all go and spend three months with one of the industry partners as part of their PhD. That is part of the CRT programme. That helps to build the networks and partnerships that Professor Nolan mentioned in order to create the network and base around which people can work.

I will defer to Ms McGee to answer the Deputy 's question, but I will echo the sentiments on the PhD stipend. We have made our own submissions to the review. It is vitally important. Working with SMEs that we seek to do with our partner Skillnet Ireland, which is keen that we get involved in skill development across the spectrum of multinationals and SMEs. Deputy O'Reilly made a good point that it is difficult for SMEs to engage. We have found the innovation voucher from Enterprise Ireland useful in the past for similar programmes. That is one of the recommendations from IBEC in this case too. I will pass back to Ms McGee.