TELECOMS TECHNOLOGY company Alcatel-Lucent has asked the Government to provide significant grant assistance for a big expansion of its Bells Labs research unit in Blanchardstown, Dublin.

Alcatel-Lucent chief executive Ben Verwaayen said in an interview that he planned to decide “within a couple of months” on the location of the project, which would establish an international centre of excellence for basic research.

Dublin is among several cities in contention for the initiative.

“We will now engage in serious discussions with the authorities to see whether we can make this happen or not,” Mr Verwaayen said after meeting Taoiseach Brian Cowen this week.

“In order to do that we need to be convinced that we can have the kind of longer term view of where Ireland is going,” he said

Mr Verwaayen declined to set out the financial scale of the investment.

He said his focus was not on the number of jobs involved, but suggested the number of staff engaged here in research might rise to hundreds from dozens.

His aim was to develop world-leading research in image-based digital communications, as well as technology to tackle climate-change.

“On one side is how we build networks that are capable of transmitting all these vast amounts of data, never meant and built for the concept of just downloading from the Internet – everything that YouTube and Facebook and all those other things the internet has to offer – and at the same time do it in a way that is helping to reduce the carbon footprint that we actually need to do.

“I came here today because we have a very fantastic creative team that want to grow that capability for Bell Labs here in Ireland instead of any other place in the world,” Mr Verwaayen continued, “but of course [what] I have to look to is Ireland the best place in the world to do that or are there other places better suited to do that."