Dr. Deirdre Lillis:

On the funding question, our latest ranking is the European Innovation Scoreboard. We are still in the strong innovators group. We are told really not to worry too much if we are ranked seventh, eighth or ninth. It is more that we stay in the category that we are in. We are still very much a strong innovator. What is really important is that we benchmark against other small advanced economies, not the UK, the US and Germany but maybe Finland, Denmark and countries that are more like us, to get good benchmarking on that.

We had the highest level of overall expenditure on research ever in 2021. It was 81% since 2010.