Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

On the specific example cited by the Taoiseach, the various skills of the approximately 10,000 PhD students working here could provide the advanced products that would, in turn, provide the maximum number of jobs, as referred to in the innovation task force report.

I will set out the contradiction evident in the Taoiseach's comments. There are a couple of hundred incubation units in third level colleges and institutes of technology, from which perhaps a couple of dozen advanced products have spun out, including some in which former presidents of universities have put in private equity. Unfortunately, the incubation units are starved of capital and have to place their product in the market. The result is that three or four of the most successful products have been bought immediately by multinational companies from abroad. This means the person who did doctoral and post-doctoral work funded by the Irish taxpayer has been subsidising the research and development budget of a foreign multinational.

I can think of four products which have been sold in this way. Approximately 15 such products have been successful. In each case, the individuals who made these discoveries and applied them technologically have stated that if capital had been available, rather than hiring four people, they could have employed 40 or 50 people or even 400 or 500 people. If funding had been available to capitalise their discoveries, as was understood in the innovation fund, they would not have had to sell on the huge yield of the intellectual work they produced individually and in groups. Instead, we would have kept these high end developments and created the highest quality jobs in our own system instead of, as it were, forcibly migrating them onto those who are getting research on the cheap. While individuals, including those who have put in some private equity, will make a large short-term yield, we will lose the benefit of the investment we made in education, the discovery itself and the employment it creates in future. This does not make sense. Why is the innovation fund not seeking to respond in the short-term to capitalise such projects given the rich yield from them?

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