Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Calleary said one would not get gatherings outside the front of Leinster House on issues such as science funding. Having read the Bill and listened to the debate on it, I believe there probably should be gatherings outside Leinster House. I do not claim to be an expert in the area, but then I suspect most of us speaking in this debate are not experts in the area of scientific research. Therefore we can only go on the views put forward by people in the research area and affected by this debate. Having done that, I am more than concerned about the implications of the Bill and unless someone here can give me a very convincing argument to the contrary, I will be appealing to Deputies to oppose the Bill. There is not much to welcome in it and the thrust of it is deeply alarming.

It is not just I who believe this, most importantly in so far as I have gathered an opinion on it, I have gathered it from people in the science area. Dick Ahlstrom wrote in The Irish Times:

The Government is causing serious and possibly irreparable damage to Ireland’s national capacity to conduct scientific research. Its persistent demand that any State investment in science must deliver a return on investment has placed it on a path that could erode the undoubted reputational and qualitative gains in science that have been made here over more than a decade.

That is at the beginning of an article where a range of scientists in a number of areas of scientific research slate the direction in which this legislation is taking science. Science Foundation Ireland, as I understand it, was established to fund basic research. In the article Dr. John Walsh, chairman of the Irish Research Staff Association is quoted as saying: "The reality on the ground is that researchers are leaving Ireland to take up jobs elsewhere, influenced by lack of jobs and by the absence of any serious process for career development within the Irish system". Writing about SFI's Agenda 2020, Dick Ahlstrom wrote:

It has angered members of the science community, particularly those involved in exploratory or so-called “blue-skies” research. They fear their disciplines will no longer receive support in the absence of a commercial payback.

Professor Lorraine Hanlon, an astrophysicist is quoted as saying "I am disappointed. I view it as a short-term view, it is very short-sighted. In some ways it is quite cynical". Professor Tom Ray of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies is quoted as saying: "The Government uses the appeal of astronomy and particle physics to raise student interest in the sciences - and then the foundation refuses to fund these subjects". I could go on. Mathematicians are saying that under the new direction the Minister of State is pushing they are being refused funding when they previously got it. Pure science - basic science - which the foundation was established to support is now being skewed and distorted in the interests of multinationals. That is what this is about. I might be somewhat convinced it was otherwise if there was an increase in funding, but there is no such increase.

The Minister of State has obviously not read the digest - he can shake his head all he likes. I believe these eminent scientists rather than what he has said for all his head shaking. If the Government wants to establish an applied research centre, it should give it extra funding. The €150 million budget, which has already been cut slightly, is supporting nine centres similar to the additional ones the Minister of State is proposing to set up. It is also supporting smaller research clusters and the Charles Parsons Energy Research Programme. If the same amount of money is now to fund an additional six large-scale - as the Minister of State described them - research centres, something has to give. What will give is the basic research and there is already evidence this is happening.

The Government has stated mathematics is very important but the school of mathematics in Trinity College, one of the schools of mathematics with the best reputation in the world, is being refused funding by SFI because it does not fit into the new commercially oriented bringing science closer to the market approach being adopted by the Government. Do we think Einstein would have come up with the theory of relativity if he were working for a multinational? I do not think so. Would Copernicus or Galileo have learned about the proper movement of the planets if his policy objectives and priorities had been set by the feudal state of his day? I do not think so. Messing around with the objectivity of science and setting out its priorities in the way the Minister of State has done is wrong. What should be done by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, the IDA and other such agencies, is to provide extra funding for applied research in the area. The Minister of State should not mess around with basic objective scientific investigation and exploration. His case is not convincing unless it is accompanied by extra funding, which it is not.

The key provision set out by the Bill is bringing scientific research close to the market. It should not be brought close to the market and it should not be dictated by what the market wants. Of course we all want jobs and investment which can deliver jobs, and we also want research in areas such as renewable energy, although serious areas of research are missing from the 14 listed. We should expand on these. Why is only marine renewable energy included when we could develop so many other renewable energy areas? Recently I spoke to people working in science about the fact that working generators in the area of cold fusion now exist. This is very experimental and is on the cutting edge of science. The Minister of State's narrowly focused demand for commercial return linked to what multinational want, or mapping 14 areas which he believes are priorities, will mean pulling funding from more experimental areas of research. Government backbenchers can laugh all they like because I take much more seriously what scientists, mathematicians and astrophysicists say.

If the Government is serious about backing research and creating more jobs it should provide extra funding instead of reducing it and spreading it over a wider area at the expense of basic research. In the end there will be no effective applied research, which the Minister of State claims he wants, if basic research suffers. Applied research is constructed on top of basic research. If basic scientific research and endeavour in areas such as mathematics, which we already see are suffering as a result of this emphasis, is not supported then everything on top of it will not happen. We will become prisoners of multinationals.

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