Mr. Ned Costello:

I shall respond briefly to the good point made about procurement. For the information of the committee, as part of the Office of Government Procurement, we have responsibility for the procurement of all lab and diagnostic equipment for the education sector overall. We do this through the Education Procurement Service, which is located at the University of Limerick.

I do not have the data to hand but I can certainly supply a note to the committee on how exposed we are to the UK. It is certainly true to say that research and laboratory equipment is so specialised that the vast majority of it would be imported. That speaks to the point that if we end up in a situation involving tariffs, that will push costs up. We have a very good global procurement system but if we are buying specialised items from the UK which cannot be obtained anywhere else, there will be cost implications.

In response to the question on submissions to the Department on the employer funding mechanism, we will be making a submission on that. The capital issue is an interesting one. The national training fund is a recurrent fund. As far as the physical infrastructure element of capital is concerned, higher education was incredibly badly treated in the last round of capital disbursement. In that context, the current capital review will be very important both for the physical capital element but also for research. We have a very fine strategy in Innovation 2020 but there is no money in it. Research funding is denominated as capital and it has to feature strongly in the capital review.