The outlook and environment for research in Ireland has never been better. A total of £1.95 billion will be spent by the Government on research, technological development and innovation over the period 2000 to 2006. The transformation of the research landscape is already under way. Announcements are expected shortly in relation to the implementation of the Technology Foresight initiative which will involve expenditure of about £560 million in key strategic areas of technology.
We can now see the emerging structure for State funding of basic and fundamental research. This structure has four pillars:
* The first pillar is the unified teaching and research budget allocated by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) to the universities as a block grant. Funding under this heading is not "tagged". Each institution is free to decide on the distribution between teaching and research and within these categories.
* The second and vital pillar is the funding of individual research proposals and projects following competitive application processes and peer review assessments. Enterprise Ireland and the Health Research Board are two important agencies in this area. In the past funding has been modest and hopefully we can look forward to significant increases. The establishment of the Research Council for the Humanities and the Social Sciences is a major advance and indeed has stimulated thinking on the case for establishing a council for funding project research, scholarships and other support schemes in Science and Engineering.
* The third pillar is the funding of institutional research strategies again on a competitive, peer-reviewed evaluation basis. The Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions was launched in late 1998 and now involves a total allocation of £220 million - of which slightly more than 50 per cent will be provided by the Government. The programme, which is administered by the HEA on behalf of the Department of Education and Science, ensures that institutions have the capacity and incentives to formulate and implement research strategies which will give them critical mass in key areas of research. * The fourth pillar is at the planning stage. We can describe it perhaps as "mission oriented" research where institutions and researchers respond to invitations for research proposals in priority areas identified by Government. The forthcoming Technology Foresight programme, which arises from reports prepared by the Irish Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (ICSTI), is a very exciting and radical initiative under this heading.
This new exciting period in research is very different to the situation which existed until recently. Research in Ireland has been underfunded by international standards - particularly by the Government.
Governments and officials now subscribe to the view that increasing our expenditure on research is necessary to position ourselves as a high value added and prosperous economy and society.
Perhaps it is only now, when we have reached a level of economic performance which clearly depends critically on investment in education that we have the confidence to put an adequately funded research infrastructure in place? David Landes, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Harvard University, writes about the ability of a society to "create, adopt and master new techniques on the technological frontier". I like to think that we are now beginning to see clearly that spending on research is investment in the increasingly important fourth level of education. The education and training of top-level researchers and their retention in Ireland may be as important a return from the investment in research, if not indeed more important, than the specific knowledge and application outputs. This, of course, will mean that we will have to provide incentives to attract the best students into research in sufficient numbers and to offer attractive career prospects to researchers in Ireland.
Our attitude to funding research has changed because we are becoming more optimistic about research. But it won't be enough to be optimistic. As we know research outcomes are not predictable. Failure is an essential part of research activity and we need to have the courage to accept this. We will also need to ensure to be sufficiently courageous to ensure that research in Ireland meets the highest international standards and not to settle for second-best but perhaps more comfortable outcomes. This means competition on a level playing field between researchers and institutions. It means assessment and evaluation by international peers. It means refusing to settle for comfortable and less exacting conditions and being aware that low expectations are generally self-fulfilling.
