Dr. Ciar?n Seoighe:

I am grateful for the introduction. I thank the committee for inviting us here to speak about Creating our Future. It is a great opportunity to talk to the committee about it. Creating our Future is a campaign about which many of us in Science Foundation Ireland are particularly passionate. I am very proud of it. I will talk about the campaign itself, how it was run and how we engaged with the public. Then I will talk about some of the findings and what we want to do with it next. I am not an expert in autism. I am joined by colleagues, Dr. Healy and Dr. Lopez, who are much more au faitwith autism than I am. I am acutely conscious that in that regard, I am probably the least interesting person in the room. However, I am very happy to talk about Creating our Future, the campaign and how it ran. The campaign was a Government of Ireland campaign. The intent was to engage in a very inclusive dialogue with the public to understand what the public wanted researchers to look into to create a better future for everyone. It was inspired by work done internationally, notably in Netherlands and Flanders, where they have done similar campaigns to engage their public to ask them what researchers should be looking at. Engaged research is generally a trend internationally and has become more and more important.

One of the things that was really important for us in the campaign was that we had a north star. Our north star was that we would have an inclusive dialogue. I want to talk about those two things in particular. The dialogue part meant this was not a survey. It was not simply us going out to the public and asking people to give us ideas. We really wanted to spark conversations between researchers and the public. That is really where the nexus of this thing comes from. By engaging in that dialogue, we have much more informed submissions from the public. That is really what we were trying to achieve. It is not easy to achieve. It is easy enough to get to the people we talk to on a regular basis within the academic community. However, the second part, which relates to inclusivity and getting to a much broader cohort, was much more challenging.

This was an initiative led by the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. It was operationalised by Science Foundation Ireland. The main thing we realised early on was that no single agency or Department really has the breadth and reach that we need if we want to be truly inclusive in a dialogue of this nature. We established an advisory forum made up of Departments, agencies and a broad range of community, societal and enterprise groups and interest groups who could really bring the knowledge and insights to make sure we were as inclusive and accessible as we could be but also to help extend our reach. Very early on we saw that engaging in this much wider advisory forum led to a tenfold increase in the social media engagement and reach we would normally have as Science Foundation Ireland. That meant we could get to a much broader cohort of individuals across the country.

We made a point of having roadshows. We travelled to every county and set ourselves up in town halls, scouts dens, community centres, universities, shopping centres. We went to schools and a range of different locations where people were. We brought researchers to people in every county to have conversations about research, what was important to them. Learning from our colleagues internationally, we benchmarked and expected something in the region of 10,500 submissions.

In fact we hoped for slightly more because we are slightly competitive by nature. When the campaign, which comprised roadshows and carrying out brainstorms throughout the country, was finished, we had more than 18,000 submissions. This is a staggering number, far greater than we anticipated, especially given that the campaign was undertaken during the pandemic and had to be done digitally. It showed the degree to which the public engaged with this campaign. There are people who need to be called out, aside from all the different members of the advisory forum groups who came together, as it was the leads and the chairs who pulled this together. They include Julie Byrne of Nokia Bell Labs, who led on the campaigns of the advisory forum and made sure we got to every county and got to an inclusive dialogue.

As we then had 18,000 submissions that had to be analysed, we pulled in a cohort of some 70 or 80 volunteers, experts and academics, who worked together to analyse all the submissions we got, which far exceeded the number we anticipated. Many people worked over Christmas to do the analysis. We looked at it through three lenses. Every submission was read by an expert. We also did an artificial intelligence review to look at it from a linguistic perspective. We then looked at it through a human-centric lens to glean what people were telling us about their lived experience at that time.

We broke down the submissions into 16 thematic areas. Within those 16 thematic areas we had a range of different submissions. The database is available for anybody to see, trawl and review. Notably for this group, we had approximately 100 submissions related to autism. We can talk about some of those as we go through the questions. I will take members through some of the examples. Much of it was around policy and policymaking, and there was also a very personal element on what this means to people. Some of it was around areas of research on which researchers should focus.

What happens next is we need to have these conversations in this kind of environment and with our academic communities because these need to form a book of inspiration for researchers in order that they can look at these ideas and see what is of importance and interest to the public. That might direct more of their engaged research.