John Halligan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The 2018 allocation to the programme for research in third level institutions, PRTLI, is €14.3 million. A portion of the 2018 PRTLI allocation for 2018 will be used to part-pay outstanding bills for PRTLI cycle 5 projects. There were 33 projects funded in cycle 5, with the final two completed in mid-2017. The Department is now in the final stages of addressing the remaining payments associated with cycle 5 of PRTLI.

A further portion of the 2018 PRTLI allocation will be used to commence a postgraduate programme funding of both PhD and research masters, as per the action in Innovation 2020 to increase postgraduate researcher enrolments in disciplines aligned to enterprise and national needs.

This new postgraduate programme will be administered by Science Foundation Ireland, SFI, and will fund postgraduate researcher enrolments in disciplines under its remit. SFI has already announced initial calls associated with this programme in 2018 and expects to issue further calls relating to awards in 2019 and beyond.

The Department and its agencies are important funders of research with expenditure of approximately €426 million in 2017. This accounts for more than half of total Government investment in research and development. SFI funds a significant amount of oriented basic research that is scientifically excellent in line with the Government's 14 national research priority areas. A recent analysis of SFI's portfolio of funded projects shows that approximately 80% of its funding, €140 million per annum, is committed to oriented basic research projects with the other 20% in the more applied space.

As an additional support to drive basic research in Ireland, Innovation 2020 is committed to the development of a competitive fund to support qualified researchers to undertake project-based frontier basic research. In 2017, the Irish Research Council, an agency of the Department of Education and Skills, launched the frontier research programme, Laureate, with initial funding of €2.5 million. Funding is awarded based on the excellence of the research proposals and assessed through a rigorous and international peer-review process.

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