Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

While Dr. McDonagh is thinking there can I come in with two supplementaries? One is the lack of an intelligence committee in the Oireachtas. He seems to feel that that is a serious deficiency in our oversight. The second question is: as academics, have the witnesses ever been brought into a central forum by any government and asked to lay out what their priorities and research might be to allow government to adjudicate as to where we put money, or are we still putting money in a piecemeal way into one project or another while people are begging for crumbs from the table? I would love to see a group of academics who advise Government and I would pick one from each college or a number from each college to ensure we get over the rivalry thing. We do not seem to have a research policy and it does not have to be military. Cyber is massive at the moment. We do not seem to have a policy. I think there are about 20 different cyber research projects at the moment but there is nobody co-ordinating all of those and that worries me.