Mary Coughlan (Donegal South West, Fianna Fail)

The renewed programme for Government, adopted in October 2009, recognises the importance of productive public investment in research and development and sets a target of achieving a national research and development investment target of 3% of GDP. We believe the significant infrastructure investment underpinning the strategy for science, technology and innovation over the period to 2013 is central to economic recovery. The commercialisation of our research investment and the generation of a strong reputation for higher education and research, as well as output of quality graduates at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, will allow us to build a sustainable enterprise base underpinned by productive innovation activity across the economy. The recommendations in the recent report of the National Competitiveness Council that are aimed at promoting investment in research, development and innovation are welcome as they coincide with our policy goals and a number of specific initiatives taken by Government as we seek to develop the knowledge economy.

The council's report focuses on measures to enhance the productivity of Irish exporters. To that end the council makes recommendations on prioritising Government research and development spending with strong industry relevance; co-ordinating public investment in research and development through development of a single stream of funding for science research, which is undertaken by my Minister of State; reviewing the research and development tax credit; and developing intellectual property competencies.

With regard to prioritising Government spending, the decision in budget 2010 to allocate almost €600 million to science, technology and innovation priorities of Departments reinforces the Government's commitment to science, technology and innovation as a productive investment for the future and an engine of economic growth. Our goal in 2010 and the immediate future is to leverage the investments made to date in research and development in order to return investment in terms of jobs and exports while consolidating what has been built and to secure it in the long term. In the budget, and looking forward to future years, we reoriented the focus of the spend on science, technology and innovation. The tripling of the public investment in science, technology and innovation over the past ten years concentrated on building infrastructure and productive human capital development. The reorientation of investment is now focused on deriving maximum commercial benefit from the sunk investment to date.

The NCC also made a recommendation for enhanced metrics to assess the efficiency of the public investment across the science, technology and innovation space. In 2009 a number of high-level indicators were agreed to monitor progress in implementation of science, technology and innovation and these are being updated on a rolling basis. I have also asked Forfás to review these to establish if it is possible to develop reliable metrics relating to exports, sales, employment and import substitution as these outcomes are an important outcome of science, technology and innovation investments.

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