The Government's approach to research could harm our reputation, reports Dick Ahlstrom.
Governments invest in research to bring societal gains. It supports education and the development of human "capital" as brainpower, which in turn brings economic development. "There is no country in the world that has found an alternative to state expenditure in research," says Dr Don Thornhill, chairman of the Higher Education Authority (HEA). Although private-sector research is important, it remains an essential state activity.
Dr Thornhill therefore viewed with some concern the decision to "pause" research spending under the HEA's key funding scheme, the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions, a €635 million initiative under the National Development Plan (NDP). Cuts meant that although promised funding came through for current spending, capital funding was halted indefinitely.
This approach could slow the Government's ambition to change us from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy. It is also damaging our reputation, warns Dr Thornhill. "Researchers make long-term decisions on where they are going to locate," he says. "They are not going to locate themselves in a small country that has a stop-go policy on research. There is only one way forward. The price of going forward is consistency in investment, and the stop-go is not part of a consistent policy."
Yet successive governments were tremendously consistent when building the industrial base that in the 1990s fuelled the Celtic Tiger. We have for 50 years maintained a low-taxation policy as a trade-off for inward investment, he says. This consistency, which reassured incoming companies, is now needed to build our world reputation in research.
Foreign competition means Ireland has no choice but to move up the "value chain": it can do this only by investing in research. "If we want the social fruits of education and health systems, investment in research and development is the modern equivalent of investing in the advance factories of the past."
He believes we need first knowledge production - seen in research at third-level institutions funded by Science Foundation Ireland, the Health Research Board and others - and then knowledge transfer, into applications and commercialisation.
We have traditionally been good at producing undergraduates, but lack of funding made us poor at retaining them. "We have seriously underspent on the research side," says Dr Thornhill. "We must have a culture and mechanisms to allow knowledge transfer to take place" - an area in which he believes third level to be significantly under-resourced.
Investment could also help to correct the imbalance between our GDP, at €114,479, and GNP, at €96,802. About half the difference is money siphoned abroad to the originators of the high technology we produce on their behalf.
The object of the knowledge economy is to retain more of this for Irish innovators. Yet where, he asks, is evidence of the Government's commitment, given the lack of plans beyond the end of the NDP. "The investment plans are not there past 2006," says Dr Thornhill. "We should be making plans for this now. It is absolutely necessary to do so. There is no going back: we have to stick with it."
The EU is heading for a knowledge society: it has committed to spend 3 per cent of EU GDP on research by 2010. Future investors will want to see the same commitment here. "They will judge us not by what we say but by what we do," predicts Dr Thornhill.