John Gilroy (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. I would like to comment on a statement made by my friend and colleague, Senator White, who referred to a letter written by 1,200 scientists - dated March 2011 - about two weeks after we formed the Government. Senator White seems to attempt to lay the blame for a failed Fianna Fáil policy on two weeks of the current Government's handling of the issue.

I welcome the Minister of State's dynamism in this area. Horizon 2020 is a dynamic document and we are lucky to have the Minister of State in place in this regard, as he has moved very fast on this. In November or December 2012, he moved to set targets to set up research strategic policy in proposal and industry groups and he has moved rapidly to place Ireland in a perfect position to take advantage of this enormous envelope of money to encourage research and development.

I wish to indicate my support for my colleague, Senator Barrett, on his mild criticism of the university sector with regard to its complaints of investment being displaced by this project. A central role of a university is of course to encourage research, but it is more important for it to encourage education and to prepare the next generation of entrepreneurs and researchers for the market. The sector has constantly complained in recent years of a lack of funding to bring its research to market. I know several people working in the area and they complain there is great work being done in research in the universities, but when it comes to the final stage of bringing the research to market, there is a gap. This is put down to funding and other causes, but universities cannot complain now about the lack of funding with the level of investment provided by the Horizon 2020 programme.Horizon 2020 recognises the changing nature of employment in the western world. No longer can we compete with the emerging economies for manufacturing jobs because our unit costs of labour are simply uncompetitive. Encouraging and developing the research and development sectors is where we are at and we are very good at it. We have shown our ability to attract foreign direct investment to the tune of 125,000 direct jobs and probably even more again in spin-off jobs. We have very successfully clustered our industries in this area in certain parts of the country. Clusters have the spread-out effect of attracting additional expertise and investment.