The Minister for Research says science funding here needs to reach 2% of GDP
By Will Goodbody, Science & Technology Correspondent
In the media game, the end of one year and the start of another is often characterised by organisations holding briefings where they look back at their achievements during the twelve months past or look ahead to their targets for the coming year. Often they are not very interesting gatherings – characterised by the organisation slapping its own back and listing a series of woolly aspirations for the year ahead which nobody is terribly interested in.
This morning, Science Foundation Ireland held such an event – its 2015 annual plan launch. But this one proved quite revealing on a number of counts.
First, it seems that Science Foundation Ireland as the main science funding body in the country, and Professor Mark Ferguson as its boss (and Chief Scientific Advisor to the government), are gearing up for a push for more funding for science here.
There was some explicit talk about the funding question itself, with Professor Ferguson saying clearly demand for it was there, and that last year many grant applicants were turned down because there simply wasn’t enough cash to go around. But there was also much implicit talk of money too – of capacity building or a scaling up of the sector, so that the fruits of recent investment and expansion are not lost, and are built upon.
The call for more money was met by a receptive but non-committal minister. Damien English, the Minister for Skills, Research and Innovation, acknowledged that in order to catch and keep pace with the international competition, Ireland needs to up the spend on research as a percentage of GDP from the current less than 1% to closer to 2%. Though he was quick to say there is no way that would happen in one year, or even two.
But clearly, if Science Foundation Ireland is to be able to continue to fund its twelve world class research centres properly and potentially open more, as well as meet the ongoing demands of its other funding programmes, state spending on science will have to increase soon.
The government’s policy on science funding is that it must yield an economic dividend, and as a result there are now growing links with industry. But government can’t expect industry to do more than its fair share of the heavy lifting. If it wants to create an environment where science and industry are inextricably linked and drive each other forward, it has to be prepared to put its money where its mouth is, and grow the funding in tandem with its industry partners. So expect significantly more discussion around science funding in the run up to the next budget, and the next election.
The briefing was also interesting in the context of the government’s ongoing work in framing a long overdue new science strategy for Ireland. It is hard to fathom how a government which claims it takes science seriously has still not got a new plan in place for the sector, over 12 months after the previous one expired.
Nevertheless, a new one will be ready by the middle of the year we are told. And one of its focuses, the Minister said, will be on convincing everyone that Ireland does actually fund basic research – the kind of tinkering in labs which may one day yield a huge theoretical breakthrough, but may not ever yield a new job. The Minister said the new strategy would put to bed the idea that Ireland will only fund the economy growing applied science. Quite how it will do that, without pledging a whole lot more cash to basic science, remains to be seen. But many will be watching with interest.
The number of females participating in the upper echelons of science is a problem that also remains stubbornly difficult to resolve. Professor Ferguson says the ratio of men to women remains the same up to child bearing age. But after that the number of women in science here falls off significantly, with many never returning to their careers.
SFI has tried to redress the balance, introducing a grant programme last year to help ease women who are thinking of returning to science back into the sector. But today it admitted it has had limited success, which it thinks may be down to the way it communicated the programme. And so it intends to go back to the drawing board and try again. However, arguably the problem is bigger than the science sector, and requires a much more joined up approach from government, aimed at generally making it easier for women with families to work.
Another notable nugget at the briefing was around the challenge of attracting international scientific talent into Ireland. SFI deliberately set out last year to start bringing big international science stars in to do their research here. The idea is that such names attract attention and international funding, bring global contacts and inspire the next generation. Two have already been recruited, at the University of Limerick and UCD.
But Professor Ferguson has much bigger ambitions, and spoke today of aiming to recruit 20 or 30 more. That will, however, require more funding, as typically the pay-off for these lab stars to come here is a sizeable ring-fenced seven figure research budget. It is also likely to raise the eyebrows of ambitious young Irish based scientists who have high hopes to become stars in their own right.
Professor Ferguson is also standing over his stated aim that an Irish based scientist will have won a Nobel Prize by 2020. It’s a lofty goal, which many in the sector would snort sceptically at. But interestingly the SFI boss thinks that one way to foster such an achievement would be to bring in a Nobel Prize winner to work in one of our third level institutions, even for a few months.
That’s an intriguing prospect, and it’s not clear how it would work, if any laureates would be willing to do it or if they could make the impactful contribution that they would be expected to.
But as science itself shows us all the time, sometimes the most unexpected results come from trying something different.
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