Professor Philip Nolan:

The Government has decided that Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council should merge and create a new agency. The explicit decision is that this new thing should be greater than the sum of its pre-existing parts. I am confident that the values, experiences and what each of those agencies has been able to do well will be maintained through the transition. I completely agree with the Deputy. Ireland, as a small country, has been more successful per unit investment in building strong connections with enterprise, the public service and civil society to address the important issues that face us.

I will make three comments. I do not worry that we might get distracted away from what one might call the immediate grand challenges – green and digital. The principal reason is the one that Professor Gleeson already highlighted. Researchers are citizens too. Not only is it Government and agency policy that these issues are priorities but they are priorities for the researches themselves. Researchers have pivoted towards these issues well in advance. Professor Gleeson works on the foundations of data science. During the pandemic, he and his colleagues built one of the basic models that we used to navigate our way through the pandemic. These are colleagues who are keen to apply their expertise to the challenges that we face.

Second, enterprise and Government share the view that we must also invest in fundamental research and talent. What our enterprise partners want to talk to us about is some immediate applications but - I am sure Professor Gleeson will confirm - they are also interested in what is next and what is coming over the five- and ten-year horizon. We can only know that if we have researchers, academics, post-doctorate fellows and PhD students working at the frontiers and telling us things such as the direction artificial intelligence might go and what the next generation of semiconductors or photonics might look like. Our enterprise partners want to be able to have those conversations as much as they want to have a conversation about an immediate application or thing that might be realisable as a service or product. They are both important and we need both.

The other important thing is that the basis of the Government decision was that we need to work together across silos and disciplines. We cannot have a system where an engineer works in this part of the system, a sociologist works in another part of the system and never the twain meet. Again, when it comes to those digital and green transitions, as the Deputy well knows, it is how society reacts to the technological change and how much ownership and trust they have in this change in the way services are delivered or we operate as a society. The pandemic taught us that matters more than the technology. How people use it and how it impacts our social and community structure is as important as the technology itself.

In one sense, I agree that we have to be razor sharp in our focus that the strong connections that we built up between our research system and our enterprise system are maintained and that it is extended to the public service and civil society in a strong way. Nonetheless, I am confident that through the transition we will do that, reap those benefits and build those connections more broadly across the research system.