Professor Alan Barrett:

The Deputy mentioned a range of things and I ask him to give me a second or two to talk about the ESRI's history. The ESRI was not set up by Garret FitzGerald but by Dr. T.K. Whitaker. When I became director of the ESRI one of the fun things that happened was that I got access to a whole load of files on the history of the institute. I could have spent hours going through the files but I disciplined myself not to do so. Garret FitzGerald was certainly involved in correspondence around the time. Let me outline Dr. Whitaker's thinking at the time. The institute was set up around 1960 and formed part of the Lemass-Whitaker revolution.

There was a recognition on Dr. Whitaker's part of a need for greater analytical underpinning to economic policy. The Central Statistics Office, CSO, was generating a great deal of data, but there was not a natural pool of people to conduct the analysis that fed into policy. Dr. Whitaker set it up. He was the leading public servant in Ireland at the time and possibly the greatest of the 20th century. The first director of the institute was Professor Roy Geary, Ireland's greatest statistician of the 20th century and possibly ever. The twin pillars of the institute were research and policy excellence. I am sorry for the diversion, but the Deputy triggered it in my head with reference to Garret FitzGerald.

The Deputy began by saying that our research agenda was driven by ourselves. That is not entirely true. I will take a second to describe how the institute works. We have an annual budget of approximately €9 million, some €2.5 million of which comes in the form of the block grant from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. We use this grant-in-aid to perform certain actions, such as the simulating welfare and income tax changes, SWITCH, model, the macro model and short-term forecasting. The balance of our funding - approximately 60% - is partly raised through the research programmes that I mentioned as well as commissioned work. In our research programme with the Department of Finance, the Department makes available a budget of €200,000 or €250,000 per year and a steering committee comprising ESRI and departmental officials agrees the research projects that will be conducted over a two-year or three-year period. It is a rolling cycle of research projects. The Department tells us that it needs work to be done on X, Y and Z and we, as researchers, tell it that data are available to say something interesting on same, there are no interesting data or it is not a tractable problem. There is an iteration. This is how we respond to requests for research. Likewise, we have research programmes with the Departments of Health and Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation and we work with the Health and Safety Authority, HSA, and the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA. Defining the research agenda is interactive.

The relevance to this committee is that there would be the capacity for the institute to engage and determine whether we could provide more tailored research. I hate to mention the grubby issue of money, but the institute's funding model is such that I do not have a team of people at Sir John Rogerson's Quay who have spare time. They are typically doing work under the grant-in-aid or in response to the research requests to which I referred. There is scope to engage with the committee, but a funding stream would need to be attached to it.

Previously, the SWITCH model was used for proofing. Approximately one year ago, a paper considered the gender impact of the recessionary budgets, austerity budgets or whatever one wants to call them. This is a track record on which we could develop.

Typically, we have not been a watchdog for the work of others. I will be very honest and say that we would be slightly concerned about doing that. This might sound precious, but we have a sense of how this sort of work is to be done properly. Consider my comments on the importance of basing work on large-scale representative samples so as to give a real sense of the impact of certain measures across the population. There are ways of doing this. What the institute does is in line with what bodies like the OECD do. I am worried that the committee might set us the task of overseeing someone else's work where we might have a different perspective of how the work should be done. The idea of overseeing someone's work or commenting on it might exist in principle, but I will raise that concern.