Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

I wish to reply on behalf of my colleague, the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Martin.

IDA Ireland is the agency with statutory responsibility for the attraction of foreign direct investment to Ireland and its regions. While the Minister may give general policy directives to the agency, he is precluded under the Acts from giving directives regarding individual undertakings or from giving preference to one area over others.

IDA Ireland has informed the Minister that, following wide consultation in the US and Europe with businesses and academia in the biotechnology industry and taking into account the key educational and industrial issues that it has identified, the agency believes that Ireland should make a strategic competitive investment and establish a national bioprocessing research, education, training and service facility.

According to IDA Ireland vision, such a facility should have three primary functions: training and education in bioprocessing; research in bioprocessing technologies; and scale-up capability to service the research, training, education and service needs of the institutes' stakeholders.

IDA Ireland envisages the facility will be a state-of-the-art national institute designed to provide, in conjunction with academic institutes, a substantive output of people with high level, best practice skills across the spectrum of bioprocessing activities, applicable in a real time scale-up environment. It is envisaged that it will undertake academic and industry collaborative research with an emphasis on advancing knowledge in bioprocessing technologies and techniques, the technical problems of scale-up and related issues. It will give Ireland a competitive advantage and act as a magnet of attraction for further significant investment in the biopharmaceutical industry in Ireland by both overseas and indigenous companies. It will also encourage the development of existing foreign-owned and indigenous biopharmaceutical sector and the establishment of new start-up ventures in Ireland.

On 23 July 2004, IDA Ireland, through a series of newspaper advertisements, invited proposals from collaborative groups of academic institutions to undertake the establishment of the national institute of bioprocessing research and training in Ireland. A detailed invitation specification document was issued to prospective applicants which outlined the background to the needs to be addressed, required elements, outputs and deliverables expected, criteria for adjudication and the proposal content details to be submitted. This invitation clearly spelled out the need for approval by the IDA Ireland board and the Government for any funding but also reserved the right not to accept any proposal.

Proposals were received from three consortia by the closing date of 15 October 2004 and a panel of international experts reviewed the quality, value and impact of the proposed activity on 15 November 2004. The panel's evaluation report, which recommended that IDA Ireland in the first instance negotiate with the consortium led by UCD, with Trinity College Dublin and Sligo Institute of Technology as partners, was considered by the board of IDA Ireland on 8 December 2004. They agreed to proceed to the next stage of the process and commence negotiations as recommended by the panel.

The Minister understands that these negotiations are well under way and are dealing with a wide range of substantive issues and recommendations identified in the evaluation report which were considered by the international experts to be necessary for the successful establishment of the institute. Needless to say, the issue of location will be an integral part of this negotiation process.

It is anticipated that a proposal which addresses all the issues for success will be considered by the board of IDA Ireland within the coming months before being recommended to Government for consideration.

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