Dr. Deirdre Lillis:

To step outside the performance measures, what we have asked both Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council to do is maintain continuity. In that, they will be maintaining levels of funding for the foreseeable future, which is to give comfort to the communities that there will be no big shock in any of this. The programmes that are running this year will almost certainly be running next year, maybe with a few tweaks, but the balance of funding that is there at the moment for AHSS will not change. If I recall correctly, at the moment it is funded through the Higher Education Authority to the Irish Research Council, rather than showing up on the SFI side. We are very attuned to that concern. There is a lot of goodwill between the staff of SFI and the Irish Research Council to maintain that, and they are very conscious of that piece of the amalgamations.