Professor Helen Kelly-Holmes:

We are concerned and we are not concerned. As I said, we do not need special treatment in a sense. I would be against the idea of an AHSS council on its own because we are all Irish research. That is important. Some of the definitions in the Bill did give rise to a little bit of concern but I think they can be easily fixed. The message has definitely gotten across that some of these are problematic. The definition of research is very important but it is about excellence and contributions to knowledge, and these apply to all of the disciplines.

That kind of inclusive language is very important. As my colleagues said, the recognition of different types of research is also important in that not all research needs to be applied or the application may not be immediately seen. Professor Livesey was talking about the past 20 to 25 years. When I came back to Ireland, the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, IRCHSS, which was the forerunner of the Irish Research Council, IRC, together with the Irish Research Council for Science Engineering and Technology, IRCSET, had a very narrow definition of what research in the humanities was. It was very discipline specific and had very definite ideas about outputs. I remember the first funding for my own area of applied linguistics took a long time to come for arts practice and all these areas. A broad definition with mechanisms built in for parity of esteem would reassure us massively.