Dr. Tom McDonnell:

We have a once in a generation opportunity to pluck the best researchers from the United States who are perhaps worried that funding for science is going to continue to fall, that they will not be able to research particularly interesting areas and that cold weather is coming for science in the US. We should be rolling out the red carpet to bring people over to lead teams of PhD and post-doctoral students on these cutting-edge innovative ideas in our universities around the country, not just in Dublin, and take this as an opportunity.

The United States benefited massively from researchers coming there in the middle of the 20th century. Europe now has an opportunity to take the best and the brightest from the US and build out ideas, companies and all of these things in Europe.

The Senator's point about venture capital is right, but we do not need just one European fund; we need a multiplicity of them so there is a competitive market of venture capital funds as well. We have already seen problems in terms of the development of the capital markets union. We even see when one country tries to buy out a bank in another country, governments immediately step in and say they want their national champions. It is a really big problem in Europe when there is that national focus. It a big problem for Ireland because we are so small. It brings up the cost of borrowing for businesses in the country when we do not have a genuinely competitive market. We lose out from that. Ireland cannot provide industrial subsidies at the level of the United States, France, Germany, the UK and particularly China are able to do. That means we will not be winning those wars in the future. The European focus is really the only way that we can punch above our weight.