Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail)
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To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation the reason that Ireland performed so poorly in securing funding for science research projects from the European Research Council which recently awarded €800 million to 503 applicants only four of which were Irish; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [39198/12]

Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)
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The European Research Council (ERC) is a European funding body set up to support investigator-driven frontier research. It was established to implement the "Ideas Programme" of the Seventh European Union Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7). Its main aim is to stimulate scientific excellence by supporting and encouraging the very best, truly creative scientists, scholars and engineers to be adventurous and take risks in their research. Being 'investigator-driven', or 'bottom-up', in nature, the ERC approach allows researchers to identify new opportunities and directions in any field of research.

To date Irish researchers have won ERC awards totalling €34m. While this is not insignificant, there is certainly scope for improvement and I am confident that we will see more success in ERC grants by the end of FP7. To get a better appreciation of Irish researchers’ performance in securing EU funding one has to look at the success rate across FP7 as a whole. Funding from the ERC is only one part (14.87%) of the overall FP7 budget of €50bn over the period 2007 -2013. Since the commencement of FP7 in January 2007 to June 2012, Irish researchers have won awards under the Programme totalling €438m, representing a success rate of 21.78%. This is above the EU average success rate of 20.72%. This shows that overall Ireland continues to perform very creditably vis a vis other EU Member States and that we remain on track to secure our target of €600m from FP7.