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RSS SubscribeSunday 15th August 2010
Big investment boost for research in Ireland
by John Walshe
The largest research investment plan in the history of the Republic of Ireland — €359 million — is aimed at transforming the country into ‘Europe’s innovation hub’, according to Brian Cowen, the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister).
His support for the investment is an indication of how seriously the Dublin government is hoping the so-called ‘smart economy’ will drag the country out of the economic mess it collapsed into following a spectacular property and banking crash.
This new spending will extend the life from 2011 to 2016 of Ireland’s Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions (PRTLI), which was launched in 1998 and to date has seen expenditure of €865 million over four cycles.
The programme has allowed Ireland’s higher education institutions to get decent buildings and laboratories and to attract world-class researchers. It was largely prompted and initially co-funded by Irish American philanthropist Charles ‘Chuck’ Feeney who made his fortune out of duty-free shops at airports.
It helped Ireland move from a low value manufacturing economy to a high value knowledge economy which has attracted many leading IT and pharmaceutical companies to its shores.
PRTLI provides infrastructural and financial support for institutional strategies by universities and other third level institutions in key areas of research spread across all disciplines.
PRTLI Cycle 5, which will run from 2011 to 2016, is the biggest yet with a government commitment to invest €296.1 million, with a further €62.6 million coming from private non-Exchequer sources.
The investment has been welcomed by Ireland’s universities. There had been fears that the scheme might fall victim to the drastic cuts in public spending that an increasingly unpopular government has had to impose to restore the public finances.
An example of what the money will be spent on is the €55.4 million Biomedical Sciences Development, the most ambitious construction project in the history of Trinity College Dublin. It will consolidate and co-locate pre-clinical bioscience research across five different schools, interlinking leading research in immunology, cancer and medical devices in a single facility. It will increase the ability for long-term high quality job creation through new intellectual property and highly trained enterprising researchers.
The go-ahead for PRTLI will also enable Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) to build world-class research capacity in areas linked to industry, according to the government. SFI-funded researchers are involved in more than 600 collaborations working with 349 small businesses and multinationals that, between them, employ 56,000 workers in Ireland.
