A "vicious downward spiral", with fewer high-value industries and more graduates leaving to find work elsewhere, is facing the Border region, the director of the Institute of Technology in Sligo has warned.
Dr Richard Thorn said he believed the gap between Dublin and the less-developed regions of the State was continuing to widen. Urgent investment was needed to encourage more research and development in the regions and to attract knowledge-based industries.
"There is a whole pattern of things that are happening. If you don't get high-value jobs, you don't get graduates staying in the region, and there is a vicious downward spiral," he said.
The cycle had to be broken because these companies would only locate in areas where high-quality graduates were available and where they could link in to research and development work in nearby colleges.
He said the same trend was emerging around the world, where regions relying on digital technologies and knowledge-based enterprises were growing at a much faster rate than regions whose growth was based on commodities and tourism.
Dr Thorn was highlighting what he described as "serious underfunding" of research and development activity in higher education in the border counties of Sligo, Donegal, Leitrim, Cavan, Monaghan and Louth.
These counties received just 0.38 per cent or €1.38 million from a total R&D budget in the higher education sector of €631.3 million during the period 1999-2001. There are three institutes of technology in the region, in Sligo, Letterkenny and Dundalk.
This very low investment in R&D greatly affected the ability of the region to service existing industry and to attract new vibrant companies, he said.
The problem of graduates leaving western and border regions has long been highlighted.
Last year's State of the West report by the Western Development Commission found that only 6.6 per cent of all new graduates found work in Cos Sligo, Leitrim and Donegal and that 38 per cent of graduates from the western region found their first job in Dublin.
Dr Thorn said he accepted that there was competitive bidding for R&D funding in the higher education sector, but the more funding that was given to the leading institutions the harder it became for smaller institutions to get on the first rung of the ladder.
Two-thirds of all third level R&D funding is spent in the Dublin region.
The main beneficiaries are Trinity College and UCD. Dr Thorn said this bias ran contrary to the aims of both the National Development Plan and the National Spatial Strategy.
He said he believed it was possible to positively discriminate in favour of colleges in the regions while at the same time ensuring the nature and quality of research was not affected.
An example some years ago was the Applied Research Programme, which provided funding for the institutes of technology to link with industry.
Dr Thorn said the government had to recognise that the Institutes of Technology had a legal responsibility to do R&D work under the 1992 and 1994 Regional Technical Colleges Acts.