Conor Lenihan, Minister of State for Science & Technology
Ireland needs to prove to the world that it is serious about its future in research and development if it is to have any hope of developing into a smart economy, according to Conor Lenihan, Minister of State for Science, Technology, Innovation and Natural Resources.
While he argues that the Government has made massively important changes in a short time to make Ireland more attractive to high-tech businesses, the Minister says the country must work hard and invest well in order to make itself a viable location for innovation in face of stiff competition from other countries.
“It is totally pointless us aspiring to be a smart economy if we are not making a very consistent, strong, incremental improvement in the money we spend [on research and development],” says the Minister. “Last year we took a 15% cut in the research and development budget across Government departments.
“I don’t believe we can afford to do that kind of cut because then people will say at an international level ‘they are not serious about research and development or where they are positioning themselves for recovery’ and that’s the kind of thing international investors look at very carefully.”
Even without cuts on the table the Minister says the nature of research and development means any uncertainty about funding is problematic. He suggests the Government may have to look towards an multi-annual approach in the future to let facilities know exactly what they have to spend over a three to five year period.
However Taoiseach Brian Cowen and the Government as a whole is committed to doing so, he says, and at the heart of that is an aim to bring research and development spend to 2.5% of GDP by 2013, up from the current standing of 1.66%.
In total today Ireland is spending around €2.4bn in the area of research and development, with two-thirds of that coming from the private sector.
Of course without a good education system this spend will be wasted and while the quality of Ireland’s graduates helped to create the last boom the Minister accepts that improvements are needed now if it is to be a factor in the next one.
“We can’t feed the inward investment machine unless we can keep producing the people and improve the quality of the people we produce from the education system.
“The third level institutions are already saying they have to do extra work nowadays… to give tuition to people who have already graduated to mathamatical or science-related courses,” he says, pointing out that the problems also exist in, and even stem from secondary level. “Figures at the moment on maths in Ireland are disappointing, only 16% are taking higher level maths and within that group, small as they are by comparison with other countries, they’re not predomniately high achievers.”
Minister Lenihan points to pilot schemes like Project Maths and Dublin’s upcoming tenure as City of Science in 2012 as ways in which this can be tackled, with the emphasis on making science and maths more accessible to people.
“We need to show citizens that perhaps this is where the jobs of the future are… we do need to acclimatise our population to that reality, it’s not enough for Government to say we’ve made these decisions, we need to explain them to the public,” he says.
“It’s very hard to dramatise and illustrate [the need for funding] to the public and I think there’s also a predisposition in some quarters to believe that this kind of research and investment is hard to vouch and account for,” he says. “Certainly we have to make sure that the investment being made is giving value for money too.”
Despite this he is generally positive about the health of the education sector when it comes to building a smarter economy. He points to the recent announcement by Trinity College and UCD that it is to enter into joint research projects as a sign of where things are heading.
“[UCD and Trinity have] set ambitious targets for themselves in terms of spinning out actual commercial companies, profit making companies, from the fruits of their University-based research,” he says. “In 2008 €160m of turnover was generated directly out of university-based research so people who accuse researchers in universities of living in ivory towers are quite wrong.”
The Minister says that by adding an element of business education to academic subjects colleges can create people with the ideas and knowledge to make viable companies. The Government is also looking to make the path to new businesses as easy as it can for people willing to take the leap:
“We are looking very seriously as a Government at creating a one-stop shop for anyone who wants to self-start,” he says.”We need to co-ordinate more of the state agencies so that when people look for help that they’re quickly brought into the system and allowed to start up their companies.”
Getting the infrastructure right is key too and the Minister insists the Government is doing what it can to push stakeholders towards better broadband access and more sophisticated communciations networks.
With Eircom facing financial difficulties and an uncertain future this is not easy however, especially as they are one of the most significant players in the market at the moment.
“There’s no doubt that the various changes of ownership at Eircom has not been to the benefit of the Irish people but there’s no point crying over spilt milk,” he says. “Really it’s time we got Eircom in the hands of someone who wants to be in the telecoms industry in the future rather than looking at it as another investment play.”
Listen to the interview with Minister Conor Lenihan in full by visiting http://short.ie/wqnqtf
An edited version of this interview was published in Business & Finance magazine on the 2 July 2009.
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