Pat Breen (Clare, Fine Gael)
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Question 482: To ask the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment if more funding will be provided for research and development to focus on the business strategy as worked out at the recent EU summit; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [10922/05]

Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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Research and development is at the core of the EU's Lisbon strategy. On 6 April 2005 the Commission published its formal proposal for a new EU programme for research, the seventh research framework programme — FP7 — which will run from 2007-13. The proposal involves a doubling of the research budget to approximately €73 billion over the seven-year period. The proposal is designed to give new impetus to increasing Europe's growth and competitiveness, and covers four specific research programmes as follows: co-operation, trans national collaborative research projects; ideas, frontier research — European Research Council; people, human potential — Marie Curie actions; capacities — research capacities.

The Commission will present its proposal to the competitiveness council on 18 April next where an initial exchange of views will take place. This will be followed by a more substantive orientation debate at the council on 7 June.

Many of the priorities put forward in our January 2005 position paper on FP7 have been reflected in the Commission's formal proposal. However, our openness to supporting the new priority areas included in FP7, such as, frontier research, joint technology initiatives and research infrastructures, will depend to a significant extent on the amount of funding allocated to research in the financial perspectives.

The adoption of the common position on FP7, which involves co-decision procedures with the European Parliament, is not expected until mid-2006 and the Government will work in the negotiations to ensure that the priorities to be funded under the programme, and the rules governing participation, are such as to facilitate the maximum level of Irish participation in the programme.

At a national level we have taken up the challenges set under the Lisbon Agenda, with the aim of making the Union the most competitive, knowledge-based economy in the World by 2010. This includes the goal that overall spending on research and development and innovation in the EU should be increased to 3% of GDP by 2010, with two thirds of this spend to come from industry. In August 2004, the interdepartmental group set up to examine the national policy implications of the EU's Lisbon Agenda targets on investment in research and development and to make recommendations on how Ireland should respond, reported with Building Ireland's Knowledge Economy-the Irish Action Plan for promoting investment in research and development to 2010.

The action plan took as its starting point the substantial increase in investment by the Government in science, technology and innovation which has resulted in a five-fold increase in investment in the National Development Plan 2000-2006 to €2.48 billion, compared with €0.5 billion over the period 1994-99. It sets the vision that Ireland by 2010 will be internationally renowned for the excellence of its research and be at the forefront in generating and using new knowledge for economic and social progress, within an innovation driven culture.

To realise this vision, the analysis undertaken reveals that the following targets must be achieved: business investment in research and development should increase from €917 million in 2001 — 0.9% GNP — to €2.5 billion in 2010 or 1.7% GNP. This would entail a doubling of the number of companies with minimum scale research and development activity and a quadrupling of the number of enterprises performing significant research and development.

Research and development performance in the higher education and public sectors should increase from €422 million in 2001 — 0.4% GNP — to €1.1 billion in 2010 or 0.8% GNP. The combined increases in performance in business, higher education and public sector research and development should result in gross expenditure on research and development increasing to 2.5% of GNP by 2010. Consequently, the number of researchers should reach 9.3 per 1,000 of total employment by 2010, from approximately 5.1 per 1,000 in 2001.

To work towards these ambitious targets, a Government strategic approach is required. The IDC, established as part of the Government decision on co-ordination and governance of STI, provides an appropriate high level and interdepartmental arena to make recommendations to Cabinet on the steps necessary to implement the research and development national action plan. This is expected to form a major part of the IDC's work programme in 2005.