Professor Jim Livesey:

I am delighted to be invited to participate in the process. It is actually really exciting because I am a historian and I feel like I am creating my own sources here.

All our colleagues are appearing before the committee in our personal capacities. While I have a research management role because I am the vice president for research and innovation, this is my statement, and not Galway's statement. There is some nuance here that is just for me. Like colleagues, I will not read out my career, but I have done a lot of research funding and research in various places around the world. All of that has been based on my excellent education at University College Cork, which deserves a say.

The first and most important thing to say is that in common with most active researchers, I warmly welcome the core of this Bill. A single agency, focused on the conditions for excellence can offer a simplified, coherent system of research support. It is, in my view, the condition of possibility for a flourishing public research system. The business of the committee is of course the Bill in hand and the interrogation of the heads but, as a historian, I want to locate this Bill in a wider strategic context and understand where I think we are going. The success of the Irish economy as a base for advanced manufacturing and high-value services, underpinned by foreign direct investment, FDI, is well understood. We understand our model. We are all aware of the social and cultural transformation of the country over the past 50 years, and the role higher education has played in all these processes. We understand these strong dynamics.

Systematic attention to research and innovation has only been attended to in the latter stages of these processes. It is maybe in the last 25 years that we really got serious about this. For completely understandable reasons, we have not had the policy consistency in this domain that we have enjoyed in others. There is a strong consensus that our success in advanced manufacturing and in high-value services is largely explained not by differential tax rates, but by the consistency of public policy in this domain that created a context within which actors were able to work with certainty. The point here is that for the country to develop we need to become as attractive a location for research and development as we are for manufacture and services. In fact, if you look at the classic S-curve of technology adaptation, we are now on a plateau. We are moving to the next level. If this Bill gets us to where we want to go, that will be the delta where we can move to the level we really want to be at.

This is only one element of the challenge. We need to be conscious that significant organisational and cultural innovation will be necessary if we are to achieve our shared goals. This is as true of the universities as it is of the agencies. It is not just the agencies that need to change.

I will not go through everything written in my statement here. Our current system is siloed. We understand why we are changing and it is not wilful. The missions of the various agencies are over-specified. In fact, I encourage the committee to consider integration of the other agencies as well, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA. If we are going to have a coherent research system, let us have a coherent research system while also understanding that there are specificities in health research that we cannot look at. The whole-of-Government approach that Creative Ireland has taken on is exemplary and would be wonderful in this regard.

I want to pick up some other elements that are more specific in the Bill and that are not quite so strategic. One of these is that the new agency is all about competitive funding. Competitive funding is only approximately a third of the funding that actually goes into research. We really have to keep our focus on the core funding, and my colleague has already mentioned this, which is the base on which the competitive funding stands. That has been much more consistent than the five-year and seven-year cycle you get with competitive funding.

The recognition of the HEA as the ultimate regulator of the system is great. That is covered by heads 40 to 42, inclusive. There is clarity that the funding agency is responsible for funding and that the HEA regulates. The recent HEA Act has made really clear where the resort is when there are issues.

There is one glaring gap in this domain. Under the headings of objects and functions, the duty to enhance and support research autonomy and research integrity is not explicitly called out. This is just an oversight. I think it is so taken for granted that people did not think to put it in there, but in the world we now live in, sadly, we cannot take that for granted and therefore we need to put that in. I cannot see why anybody would object.

As a historian, I wish to comment a bit on some of the anxiety about AHSS, which I do not share at all. If we look at international rankings, we are way better at arts, humanities and social sciences than we are in the sciences. In a fair system, we have nothing to worry about. I would favour no boards, because if we put language in the legislation that defines what research is, as sure as eggs are eggs, it will trip us up in four or five years' time. If we are going to future-proof this, what we need to do is leave it as open as possible and let the chips fall where they may.

This is a wonderful beginning. We have had a choppy start to public research funding in Ireland, not because there has not been great effort and not because there is not wonderful excellence in SFI and the IRC, but we have not had policy consistency. If we can get a solid foundation in here we can do great things.