Professor Helen Kelly-Holmes:

There is not much left for me to say. I would support, obviously, everything that has been said. An agency that brings together the best of SFI and the IRC and that could learn from the past could be amazing. Not everything is amazing or wonderful at the moment. There are lessons that can be learned in order that some of the really successful funding programmes are extended, that we think about new ways of funding and that we learn from other agencies. For example, a programme I am involved in involves Germany rethinking its new excellence strategy. They are going back to basics with funding clusters of excellence. The Nordic countries have also done this with their centres of excellence. They are open to all areas and can be really good in capacity building. They will not suit all of our disciplines but they can do. Likewise, we could open up the centres for research training to AHSS. We have some really strong areas that have good track records and capacity in supervising PhDs. Perhaps we could bring these in from SFI and mainstream those kinds of cluster programmes as well.