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Unlike most of the rest of society, the Irish science and research community has some genuine reasons to be cheerful, with major new funding announcements recently.
The new funds for research, announced at the end of February by the government and Intel, have sent out a signal that Ireland remains serious about becoming a knowledge-based economy. To achieve this, research funding must remain high on the agenda.
The new public funds will be administered by the state-sponsored body Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), which is to provide €23.9m for five projects. These Strategic Research Clusters (SRCs) will link academic researchers with industry.
Following this came the Intel announcement that it is to invest €50m in its Shannon research and development facility and create 134 high-technology jobs over four years. In the future, Shannon will be at the centre of the creation of new Intel products.
These moves help – in stark contrast to the banking and financial sector – to create confidence that all is well in research in Ireland.
The new SRC research collaboration projects involve universities, institutes of technology and indigenous firms and multinationals.
UCD will receive €3.56m for work that will make it easier to analyse people's use of internet, email and mobile phones. "I am delighted the government would still spend money to develop the R&D infrastructure in the country. That was a brave thing to do," said UCD's Professor Pádraig Cunningham.
"We could revert to a situation where salaries drop considerably and then we are able to compete in manufacturing jobs with countries in eastern Europe. The alternative is that we go after high-value R&D business. This SRC programme will identify research challenges of interest to business. It has got the best prospect of delivering technology that will be useful for industry."
Waterford IT has been granted €5.86m for research into the infrastructure that will support the future of the internet. The idea is to develop ways and means to maximise the available internet infrastructure, and save money.
"In terms of the way forward, I feel that this type of investment is really going to drive the future development of ICT in Ireland," said WIT's Dr William Donnelly.
"By doing this type of research now we build up the knowledge and expertise that allows us to roll out the infrastructure for the future internet. That's going to attract the multinationals here because we are ahead of the curve. It's also going to create a huge number of indigenous jobs."
DCU will receive €4.9m for work into what's called 'separation science'. This field, which is crucial to the pharmaceutical and food industry, for example, helps to provide very precise measurements of materials. "The money that the government has funded here will be doubled at least by the time the cluster finishes. That's investment back into people and research in Ireland," said DCU's Professor Brett Paull. "We will rapidly expand our research base through this kind of mechanism. In our model for this cluster we will pay back the Irish taxpayer by bringing in extra money for companies.
"It's a very important signal for researchers overseas, and for companies, to see that research goes on in Ireland and is still pushing forward – that's a big signal."
DCU, has also been granted €4.3m for developing 'plasma technology' that can provide the basis for cheaper and higher tech manufacturing.
"There is, of course, going to be some impact of the present economic environment, but we haven't, for example, seen any pulling back from the companies," said DCU's Professor Miles Turner.
NUI Galway will receive €5.16m for the development of new molecules and therapeutics that can control disease-causing bacteria in the gut.
"With the current crisis, globally, there is a sense of gloom, but this is also the time when the next leaders emerge," said NUI's Professor Lokesh Joshi.
"It is important to realise, and have pride in the fact, that the country has made significant investment in bolstering its science and research in the past decade."
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There are positive aspects to the report on SFI funding. Firstly, the award of a grant to WIT is very positive. It may indicate that the “stranglehold” of a clique of “big scientists” on the SFI is loosening. From the outside it seems that WIT have developed a very productive group around telecommunications software and systems. The obsession with articles in high-impact journals and rankings in world university listings may be waning in the SFI and criteria with much more relevance to Ireland may be gaining ground. Well done WIT.
Secondly, the emphasis in the SFI press release referring to its Science Research Clusters (SRC) programme under which these awards were made is positive. It says this programme was introduced “to link scientists and engineers in partnerships across academia and industry to address crucial research questions----”. This is a subtle change from the description of the SRC programme on its website as “designed to facilitate the clustering of outstanding researchers to carry out joint research activities----” . I hope this subtle change is not just spin - to curry favour with the government at this time of scarce resources. My experience in UCD tells me that some academics are among the best spinmeisters around – and sometimes they even believe their own spin. SFI already has a programme called CSET whose primary purpose seems to be to create partnerships across academia and industry so scepticism is warranted I suggest. Grants have been made under the SRC programme which would seem to have virtually no chance of leading to anything of substance – although the lack of access to information about the projects makes informed comment and judgement difficult. Only one cheer therefore for SFI at this stage.
Having tried to inform myself as best I could from various reports on the issues I have reached the conclusion that we should concentrate most of our efforts on the Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) area rather than on the Life Sciences area. The ICT area seems to lend itself much more readily to the establishment of new business start-ups and seems to be much more dynamic.
The development of new drugs is an extraordinarily expensive and long-drawn out process and is dominated by big pharmaceutical companies. We need to produce graduates up to PhD level who are up to date with the latest developments in the Biotechnology and Life Sciences areas to go into the pharmaceutical industry. Favourable taxation for R & D by such companies is very sensible. However, a lot of basic biomedical research is a very expensive black hole into which unlimited sums of money could be poured and from which any return is very unlikely. Let those interested in this type of research compete for international funding unless they can come up with evidence that Irish funded research has generated a good return – not just promises. Three of the SFI projects seem to fall into this rather dubious area.