Third-level institutions should work together on key projects instead of fighting each other for funding, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said yesterday.
"It is not sensible to have our third-level institutions pitched against each other across all key disciplines.
"Ireland is a small country. By virtue of our size, we will never have the same scale of infrastructure in place as some of our international counterparts.
"In my opinion, the optimal research approach across so many disciplines is the collaborative approach."
The Taoiseach was speaking in University College Dublin, where he opened the university's Centre for Synthesis and Chemical Biology (CSCB) building.
The State contributed €26 million to the project - the largest single investment in chemistry research ever made by the Government. The new building also received undisclosed funds from Chuck Feeney's Atlantic Philanthropies organisation.
UCD president Dr Hugh Brady said that Atlantic Philanthropies had been a catalyst in transforming the Irish research landscape.
"When the history of Irish higher education at the turn of the millennium is written, the name of Atlantic Philanthropies will undoubtedly hold an honourable place.
"It would be difficult to exaggerate how bleak the Irish research landscape was, certainly when I came back here at the end of 1996."
The CSCB project is a collaboration between UCD, Trinity College Dublin and the Royal College of Surgeons.
It is a 2,300 sq m building containing six state-of-the-art laboratories and nuclear magnetic-resonance facilities. More than half of all medicines have natural products as their base. Scientists in this centre are trying to reproduce these naturally-occurring medicines in the laboratory and are working to discover new molecules with better biological activity.
Some 100 PhD graduates and more than 50 post-doctoral fellows have been working at the centre.
Mr Ahern was met by a student protest over grant payments when he arrived at the Belfield campus yesterday.
Several students, chanting "Bush's Man, Blood on your Hands", had to be restrained by gardaí as the Taoiseach entered and left the building.
Some students were wrestled to the ground as they tried to confront Mr Ahern's car when the Taoiseach was being driven away.
A Garda spokeswoman said that there were no arrests.
