Research badly hindered by lack of money, support

The report of TCD's working party on research advocates a "root and branch" review of research infrastructure. The report highlights the lack of a suitable infrastructure to carry out research.

"College does not have the necessary discretionary resources at its disposal to upgrade the infrastructure or to directly support staff in their efforts," the document states. "The potential of college in research and scholarship is consequently not being fully realised."

Despite TCD's undoubted research success - the CIRCA report noted that the international citation rate for Trinity in learned journals is the highest in the State - "the fact is that only a small proportion of staff is able to mount a successful internationally competitive programme of research and mostly through external funding from a range of sponsors. The indications are that our performance is constrained not by a want of ideas, but by the base supporting resources."

Most sponsors cover only some of the costs of research, including salaries and travel, the report notes. The cost of laboratories, state-of-the-art research libraries and space must be paid for by the college. In some areas, in the humanities and social sciences, there is no external funding available. Because of the low level of State support and the difficulty of generating private funding for current expenditure, the college has few discretionary resources. Even if more external funding were available, the college infrastructure would be unable to support large increases in research activity. "In many cases staff are on or below the threshold of being able to carry out competitive research and are extremely sensitive to time pressures, fluctuations in external funding and quality of support facilities. In other cases, far too much precious time is spent chasing external funding, sometimes for very small amounts," the report observes.

TCD is overly dependent on external funding. This makes strategic planning by staff difficult to achieve and there is a temptation to "follow the money", the report says. The increase in undergraduate numbers has limited the time staff have to spend on research.