Mairéad Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome what the Minister has said about the forum. Will the Minister provide a little detail as to how many people can participate? I am aware that the Minister has met stakeholders and is, of course, aware of some of the concerns that have been raised around the need for the Bill to set out that there will be parity of esteem between disciplines. That is completely understandable. The Bill will be merging SFI and the IRC. The former is obviously significantly larger than the latter and attracts considerably more commercial funding. I have no problem with commercial funding for research in principle but in practice, if funding is primarily commercial, those disciplines which produce research that is not quite as quantifiable could suffer. We obviously need to ensure that does not happen. We can think of the great research that has been done in the arts and humanities, and so on. Those are not disciplines in which the output will realise a financial return. We need to ensure a focus on that point.

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