Dr. Ciar?n Seoighe:

I bid everyone a good morning. I thank members for the invitation to speak to the committee today about Creating Our Future. I am here representing Science Foundation Ireland but, more broadly, the Creating Our Future campaign, which everybody who has been involved with it is so passionate about and determined to bring forward some of the recommendations.

Creating Our Future is a campaign that was led by the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Simon Harris, and his Department and operationalised by Science Foundation Ireland. It is a campaign where we really want to engage the community and the people of Ireland in a conversation about what it is they would like researchers to explore to create a better future for everyone.

Key to the campaign – our North Star – is that this needs to be an inclusive dialogue. Those words are very important to us. They set the tone of what we did and how we did it. It is relatively easy to engage with the same cohort of people and to engage in the same conversations, but it is really hard and exponentially more challenging to get to the people whom we do not normally engage with or talk to. This was important to us as part of the campaign.

It is a campaign that was inspired by what was done in other countries. Colleagues in Flanders, the Netherlands and other geographies around the world have done something similar, but we wanted a uniquely Irish campaign. To engage the Irish people more generally in the conversation, it took a much broader cohort than SFI or our own Department. We engaged an advisory committee, which included every Department, agency, lobby group, business group and interest groups from around the country to help us to get the information on the campaign out there. That worked incredibly well. The advisory committee increased the reach, but it also taught us a lot about the language we use, the way we engage, and how we make this accessible. The Cathaoirleach is correct in what he said in his opening remarks. The science is to be for everybody. It is more than science. This is research in the broader sense. What we see is the transdisciplinary nature of research as well. It has to be for everybody and by everybody. In fact, one of the terms that comes across quite a lot is the importance of what is called engaged research. That involves engaging with the people who might be the ultimate consumers, users and beneficiaries of that research.

The campaign itself, our North Star, was inclusive dialogue. What that meant was we wanted to have conversations with the public in Ireland. The conversations were between the researchers and the public. We wanted to have a real dialogue and to get to all walks of life. We saw that by engaging with our advisory forum, we increased the reach tenfold from what we would normally be able to engage in conversation through Science Foundation Ireland's normal channels. We increased the reach so much that we were able to have conversations with people we do not normally engage with. We ran a roadshow, which went to every county. We had a coffee truck and we went to every county in the country, sometimes multiple times. We went to all the universities and engaged in the conversation. We brought researchers into town halls, schools and scouts' dens throughout the country and they talked about what they were doing and engaged in dialogue. We were not doing a survey. This was not merely about going to the public and saying "Tell us what you want", but it was an informed dialogue and conversation.

We are delighted today to be joined today by two colleagues. As always in these discussions I am acutely conscious that I am the least interesting person in the room, because it is the colleagues who implement the recommendations and who are working with the public or doing the research who make this happen. They are the ones who get into the depth of the questions and explain what we have discovered.

We are joined by Ms Deirdre de Bhailís, who is the manager of the Dingle Hub, and Dr. Karen Keaveney, who is assistant professor of rural development at UCD and working with the UCD centre for Irish towns. These two colleagues know much more intimately the details of what it is the public are saying and what that means in the context of the work and research they are doing. They will be able to give us much more detail on what that means.

When we ran the campaign, at one point we were hoping to have about 10,000 submissions. We benchmarked against other international organisations which had done something similar, based on population. We have a very engaged public so we rapidly exceeded our target of 10,000 submissions and we ended up with more than 18,000 submissions in Ireland. No other geography has since exceeded that, irrespective of their population size. We have vastly more interest in this area from the Irish public than anybody else has achieved. In a way, that means we are beholden to make sure this is translated into real actions.

We are very grateful to the groups of people who assisted in the campaign. We were expecting to have 10,000 ideas to look at and we suddenly foisted them with 18,000 ideas and asked them to review them. We reviewed them using a cohort of approximately 70 or 80 academic colleagues and other experts, who undertook to read every single submission and analyse them. We did an artificial intelligence, machine learning type of review as well to understand what it meant. We also did a human-centric view to look at what people were saying and what that meant through the lenses of humans. Having looked at all of the ideas, the expert committees turned them into a series of recommendations and themes. What we want is these 18,000 ideas to be a book of inspiration for researchers who can look at it and say, "This is important to me. This is what I am hearing. This is my work. This is what it means." It can be something for policymakers. The reason we are here today is to say this is what the public are telling us. This is what their interest is, and we have a voice we can hear from. It is a real repository of information as well about Irish life and society.

We were looking through the submissions in the context of this committee in particular. There is quite a vast selection of submissions from communities around Ireland when we look at the kinds of things that have come up. We also submitted an 80-page document, including a shortlist of the ideas. Some of the issues that have come across in particular is how towns and cities are planned with stakeholders and public interest at heart; how to plan community infrastructure, in particular for dealing with the lonely, the elderly and teenagers; and how to have sustainable regional development, which connects into well-being and a sense of community and builds on the very Irish sense of community. There is a particular term that was used in the report that I am very fond of, which is the concept of the meitheal and how that relates to an Irish sense of community.

Other issues include the role of migrants in rural areas, and creating a sense of belonging; reimagining climate-friendly transport solutions and transportation and housing for local communities, which is something that came up repeatedly in the suggestions; building on our research leadership in technological areas and our innate sense of openness and strong sense of identity to support diverse communities; increasing the levels of stakeholder and community engagement in community, regional and rural development; and the role of the Irish language in today’s society. These came up through many submissions, there were hundreds of them in this area. They all related to the common themes of what it means, what has changed in the rural environment and what we can do to make it better.

What is also clear from the findings is that no one strand of research is going to solve all our problems. We need technological solutions and social sciences, the arts and humanities in order to arrive a transdisciplinary approach to how we are going to resolve these questions and provide a better future for everyone. We are delighted to have the opportunity to explain some of this. We are operationalising it in the context of the national challenge fund and other programmes that we run. However, we really do want to engage and welcome a conversation with the committee on what this means for policymakers, to explain the campaign and the findings from it and to deep dive into some of the work about which some of my colleagues can go into more detail. I am very happy to explain that, and to have further conversations on these matters. I thank the committee.