James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am proud to see a Government led by a Fianna Fáil Taoiseach initiating a new Department of higher education and research. Actually, I believe the Minister has renamed it to the "Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science". It follows in a tradition. I am proud of my party's history in this area, in particular higher education and research. In 1940, Eamon de Valera, another Fianna Fáil Taoiseach, established the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, DIAS. People like Seán Lemass and T. K. Whitaker opened the door to foreign direct investment, FDI, in the 1960s and Donogh O'Malley opened the door to secondary school education in 1969. The Lemassian FDI economy that opened up the doors for the first time to newcomers and economic expansion, coupled with Donogh O'Malley's investment in second level education, drove on the next wave of our economic activity and success in what I call a graduate pipeline, in that we began to develop the school leavers and third level graduates who would go on to work in those FDI centres. This helped to attract to our shores multinationals and investment in technology, pharma, electronics and many other sectors.

No more than now, the DIAS was established at a time when dark clouds were gathered around the world. We were on the brink of the Second World War. Now, we face the Covid pandemic. The parallel is that a Fianna Fáil Taoiseach took the initiative to invest in a research centre as well as research-driven activity and incentivisation at a time when there were economic pressures and competing demands for that money. Then as now, it showed foresight. I hope that our foresight now will bear fruit if we follow through on it.

I will trace all of that through to the creation of Science Foundation Ireland in 2001 or 2002. I pay tribute to the former Minister, Mary Harney, who was involved in that development. That began to move us from a graduate pipeline for multinationals and new technology firms to the next level in terms of higher end activity, research and innovation. The higher up the chain we go, the more added value we create and the more difficult it is to offshore, reshore or move around such activities and the more embedded they become.

When I proposed the idea of this Department to my party leader, now Taoiseach, two years ago, I was delighted that he took the baton and ran. It was part of Fianna Fáil's manifesto, was a pivotal part of the Government talks and if today's motion passes, it will be part of the Government programme.

When I was Opposition spokesperson for science, technology and research, I was intensively engaged with the universities, agencies and research sector. I was struck how despite early advances, the lack of attention given to the sector in the last decade had seen it suffer. Statistics can be trotted out to suggest that Ireland is in the top ten or top five of various things which different agencies do. There is some merit in those claims but some of the rankings are based on long-term activities and some of the citations represent the tail end of the investment in the early 2000s and before that. Were the decline in the channelling of funding to the research sector to continue, in five or ten years we would see the rankings trail off, indeed this is something we are already beginning to see. Our universities' plight is at the centre of that. In the last two years, no Irish university occupies a place in the top 100. That is an awful indictment on the land of saints and scholars. We had two or three at one stage, with UCD and TCD ordinarily in the top 50 until recently. Trinity College Dublin is at 101 and hopefully it will get over the line again. Those rankings are indicative of the decline. Statistics tell one story, the community will tell another.

It is also the case that the funding that was available in recent years was channelled in a particular, narrow way. Funding was targeted at things that could generate jobs and that had a short-term economic potential. That is an important part of the strategy but should never be the be all and end all. The pursuit of knowledge is a public good in its own right but it is also the foundation of a successful society and nation and will drive longer term dividends.

The last time there was a programme for research in third level institutions, PRTLI, was in 2010 when, at the height of the fiscal crisis, the then Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, committed over €350 million into the broad-based fund that went across all the centres across all the higher level institutions to allow the renewal of labs and libraries and the bread and butter type activities. That fund is yet to be refreshed. I asked for that several times during the last Dáil without joy. I strongly suggest that the new Ministers examine PRTLI or a similar successor to channel into the sector. We need to fill that funding gap.

I mentioned the economic implications for Ireland to compete on the world stage. Ireland has gone from an agrarian economy to a post-industrial one in about 20 years through the Lemassian initiatives about which I spoke. Our direct economic rivals are not the BRICs, the Brazil, Russia, India, China economies, or the United States. We are part of the EU block, and I suppose part of that is our competitor, but our competition is the small advanced economies, such as New Zealand, Denmark, Israel or South Korea. Those are states that invest heavily in research and development, R&D. The last Government's R&D target was 2.5% of GDP but got nowhere near that; the height of it was 1.45%. If we are to compete on the world stage in the knowledge economy, which is where we should set our sights, we need to get to 2.5% and far beyond it which is where states such as New Zealand, Denmark and Israel are already. It is no coincidence that those are the states that were also seen as being successful in the pandemic. Presumably they had the science to back things up.

There are huge opportunities in the area if we do things right and capture them correctly to build value added activity. Life sciences, pharma, tech and Internet have many firms that are already here and many more will invest. Most importantly, indigenous firms will rise and spring up because we have the talent. We have no shortage of brainpower and raw talent, but we need to reward it, prioritise it, invest in it, foster it and keep it on these shores. We need to couple that with our existing strong position as being attractive to foreign direct investment. Our membership of the European Union, English-speaking population and tax regime have been strong points and are crucial to our economic offering, but it will be crucial to the recovery because we are looking to a digital recovery. It also ties in with the green recovery, with new technologies and digital methods of doing things.

Beyond the economy, it is important that we fund research across the board. The best discoveries happen by accident, not when someone is tasked with a lab report to find, say, a new strain in 12 months, but when people are sent into a lab or library to see what they can get. That is how they can go and discover, like Newton in the orchard discovering gravity, Euripides discovering volume in the bath or Tim Berners-Lee in CERN discovering the world wide web in the 1970s. These kinds of globally changing, epoch making initiatives happen because someone is curious and they are given the tools to satisfy their curiosity and then to build on that.

I referred to CERN. We need to engage internationally. We are members of the European Space Agency. In the last term we joined the European Southern Observatory, something I worked with astrophysicists to ensure happened. These may be small in their own sectors but they have massive ramifications and great opportunities flow from them in way of tenders, study opportunities, jobs and the ability to collaborate. There was cross-party agreement on CERN at the all-party enterprise committee in the last Dáil. I hope that continues into the next stage by the Government. It is a very obvious win.

As Opposition spokesperson in the last Dáil I found myself asking questions of up to five different Ministers. There was a Minister of State for higher education, Mitchell O'Connor, John Halligan, with whom I worked with on many issues, had responsibility for innovation and there were senior Ministers in two Departments and another Minister of State, Deputy Breen. Occasionally there were answers from the Department of Finance, or from the Department of Justice and Equality if a data protection issue arose. It seemed as though the responsibilities were scattered across multiple Departments. The Department of Education and Skills is squeezed and under pressure, particularly with the pandemic, and it is all about the schools. It makes perfect sense that such an economically and strategically critical part of the nation and society should have a home in its own Department and be centralised where it can build excellence, and to have one point of responsibility. This is what we are working towards with the new Department. I wish it every success. It is badly needed and it is an important part of the jigsaw that had been neglected until now. I hope the Department does come to fruition, as I am sure it will, and I am sure that it will with the passing of this legislation. I look forward to the huge opportunities to put Ireland on the world stage, elevate us and build our economic and intellectual potential and our knowledge base in the decades ahead.

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