Dr. Darrin Morrissey:

I have sympathy with that. We have used the term "interconnectedness"; there are other funders in the system and we need to approach this in a national funding way.

Innovation 2020, the national research strategy, calls for a place for basic research funding, and it looks as if things are moving in this direction, as Science Foundation Ireland will play a bigger role. The quantum of that role remains to be seen. Engagements between the Health Research Board, as a more applied health research funder, and other funders, will allow a basic funding pot to flourish. We engage with organisations such as The Wellcome Trust. We co-fund with it and pull leverage funding into the State for use for basic funding. We do the same with the National Institute for Health in the United States, and others.

I wanted to address many points but I am aware that we are running out of time. The data issue is more complex than has been outlined. The recommendation is founded on the issues that abound whatever jurisdiction one is in, in the context of data governance, mining people's data, and data protection. Linkage is not easy. A lot of investment has come into this area, most notably from companies based in Northern Ireland, in order to set up safe havens for data linkage, using principles that the CSO would know a lot about. We wrote a paper in 2016, known as the data access, storage, sharing and linkage, DASSL, report. I have copies of the report and am very happy to hand them out. It makes proposals which the Department of Health is minded to run with. It is more complex, but we believe there is a solution within it.

On the subject of intellectual property, IP, ownership, all funders in Ireland sign up to the national IP management protocol. The simple answer to the question Deputy Donnelly asked about the percentage that flows through each project is that it depends on the project and the skin in the game that the industry or private sector partner has. The rules are laid out in the national IP framework, which is linked to state aid and European legislation. That is a simple answer.