Sir, - Many of your recent correspondents on the matter of research funding have rightly drawn your readers attention to the recent aborting of the 1998 Fundamental Science Programme and the "Strategic Research Initiative " (SRI) proposals made by the Higher Education Authority.
At the outset let me say that every practising researcher welcomes the injection of £4 million pounds into the research infrastructure of the colleges. However, the price exacted for that injection, the aborting of the Fundamental Science Programme, is completely out of proportion to the expected benefits, in the event that there are any.
The HEA's proposal to fund only basic research (by outstanding researchers) in areas deemed by individual colleges to be their strong areas, is the most radical change in the structure of higher education here since the establishment of the RTCs (now ITs). We are already beginning to see the very raison d'etre of the ITs being undermined as we establish specialist universities. In the past few days we have seen NUI-Galway decide that "biomedicine" is the only programme that will be supported by the college in the new era. NUI-G's physicists, chemists, mathematicians, marine biologists, engineers, geologists, etc. need not apply.
While it is probably a good thing that individual colleges should identify their individual strengths and play to them, unless there is some support mechanism to support those researchers who are merely excellent but may be outside the chosen area, the inevitable consequence is that each college (IT and university) will become a specialised centre in one or a small number of disciplines. However, the specialisation is likely to go much further. The HEA's SRI is competitive (as it should be), the scientific quality of the proposed research may be taken into account when deciding who wins and who loses. In this context it is inevitable that once a college fails to "win" an SRI grant it will step onto a downward ratchet that is impossible (not just very difficult, impossible) to get off. If a college loses once it is now less likely to attract the "outstanding" staff needed to produce a viable proposal, less viable proposals are less likely to be funded, being less fundable, the college is less likely to attract "outstanding" staff and so it goes on. The real losers here will be the smaller universities and all of the ITs. "Loser" colleges will fail to attract students. This is not idle speculation, we need only look over the border to see a real life example in Queen's, where several departments are being shut for very similar reasons.
The SRI proposal from the HEA needs to be the second part of a two part system. The first part, a system to support individual research groups with good ideas, was aborted by the Minister for Science, Technology and Commerce.
The SRI proposals are dependent on staff in the colleges, not the other way around. Colleges can only propose programmes in which they have the necessary expertise. That expertise has been cultivated by allowing individual researchers the opportunity to develop their ideas, a concept specifically excluded under the SRI proposals. The new system provokes many questions:
How are "loser" colleges to be compensated to prevent the downracheting of their abilities? How are smaller colleges and the ITs to be assisted to ensure a level playing field? To maintain a regionally dispersed technological expertise, how are individuals with good ideas to be supported if their ideas do not mesh with the greater college plans? How are the 80 per cent of projects funded under the Fundamental Science Programme and excluded from the SRI on the grounds of being "too applied", to be supported? How are good ideas to be generated if the mechanisms that would support their development are no longer working? How does the scrapping the Fundamental Science Programme fit with Fianna Fail's stated S&T policy object of increasing support for fundamental research? How does the SRI proposal ensure that the Minister's recently announced, and expensive, Technology Foresight exercise is not short-circuited? How is the IDA's "HighTechnology" strategy to survive if its dependence on local expertise has been compromised?
Projects such as the development of anti-leukemic agents; projects on the development of dementia and memory; projects on the development of new materials; are among the projects that were submitted to the Fundamental Science Programme but fell when the programme was aborted. There has never been an attempt to explain why the Fundamental Science Programme was scrapped. The Minister's own secret Technopolis report on the Programme confirmed its worth and relevance, both directly and indirectly, to industrial development and economic growth.
The Minister's SRI proposals must grow, organically, out of the research expertise in all the colleges, this requires that there be some sort of direct, college-independent, support for individual researchers. The SRI proposals are an idea whose time has come, let's not have them stillborn because of a short-sightedness, political opportunity or inter-Departmental rivalry. -Yours, etc., (Dr) John Donovan,
Executive Secretary, Irish Research Scientists' Association, Sandyford, Dublin 18.