Professor Brian Ó Gallachóir:

On precarity, one reflection I had when I was thinking about the question is that we had many authors working on this report, yet many of them are not here and not in our universities any more, or are doing something else in our universities, partly because of that precarity the Senator speaks of. The second thing I wanted to say is the public funding available for research is quite abysmal compared with our fellow EU member states. I think the number across the EU in terms of the percentage of economic growth that is invested in research is between 2% and 3%, I am not sure of the precise number. In Ireland it is closer to 1% or 1.5%. We have this really low level of funding for public research that needs to increase if we are to deliver on the contribution from the research community to this challenge.