Dr. Deirdre Lillis:

As the Secretary General mentioned, there are quite a number of strands of activity in this area. On the research side we have a North-South research collaboration call which will invest €50 million. Of this, €37 million has been allocated through the first call, which is up and running. There is collaboration between universities in the South and typically the University of Ulster and Queen's in the North. Hopefully we are about to launch a major research centre using the SFI research centre model. This is co-funded between Ireland, Northern Ireland and the UK for the two areas of climate and sustainable food. The SFI call for this is live and should be announced shortly. There is some very strong collaboration on the research side, which then filters down to the undergraduate space.

We recently approved approximately €2 million to support Northern Ireland students to go on exchanges because, once the UK left the EU as a result of Brexit, those students lost access to the Erasmus programme. We supplemented that and provided some opportunities for Northern Ireland students to come to Ireland for a semester but also to travel to European countries.