Dr. Patrick Prendergast:

We need two things. First, we need the constraints to be taken off the TU sector. The Deputy might not know this but the contracts that academic staff can be offered and their remuneration within TUs is very much less than in traditional universities. We in the TUs need to have those constraints taken off to allow us to compete in the market for top class academics who can compete for this European funding and, indeed, to incentivise academics already employed in the TU sector to compete for it too. The Deputy is right; there is plenty of money on the table for research Europe-wide and the TU sector wants to play a greater role in successfully getting this money into Ireland. Different kinds of academic contracts are needed and a little more flexibility in how we manage those contracts is also needed. We also need the State to make a significant investment in the TUs, including capital investment to upgrade the buildings because we cannot do top-quality European research in much of the current infrastructure that we have, certainly in SETU.

We also need capacity building through hiring staff to compete for those research funds. We will get every euro of investment in that kind of infrastructure - capital investment and people - back many times over in successfully competing for European research funds. As the Deputy said, significant amounts of money are out there but we need to incentivise people, and have the resources and infrastructure, to go with successfully competing for that funding.