Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Under the Universities Act 1997, Technological Universities Act 2018 and the Institutes of Technology Acts 1992 to 2006, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are autonomous entities including with regard to the management of their library facilities and as such my Department has no function in this matter.

My Department does, however, provide funding to the Irish Research eLibrary (IReL), which is a nationally funded e-resource licensing consortium providing access to leading science, technology and medicine and humanities and social sciences resources on behalf of participating Irish publicly funded HEIs. IReL delivers quality peer-reviewed online research publications including journals, ebooks, databases and index and abstracting services.

In 2020 the Technological University (TU) Transformation Fund administered by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) allocated € 1.2 million to TU Dublin for IReL related activity.

In 2021 and 2022 the HEA delivered €2.6 million to IReL for the support of transformative agreements and €300,000 for IReL management costs. This support is linked to the open research agenda in the context of moves to counter costs through the creation and use of open access materials and open educational resources including open textbooks. My department also provides €5.85m annually to support IReL, outside of these supports.

In April 2022 under additional TU oriented funding secured by my Department and the HEA under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, the HEA signed a sector wide grant agreement with all 5 technological universities, Dundalk Institute of Technology and Dun Laoghaire, Institute of Art, Design and Technology for delivery of an education and training reforms programme which includes work packages to adopt and deploy IReL across the entirety of the technological sector.