IRELAND

In March 2015, more than 800 research scientists put their names to a public
letter that raised important questions about the nature and the future
development of investment in research in Ireland. The letter noted that the
current investment in applied research is welcome and forms an essential
part of an overall strategy to generate economic return from scientific
research. However, without a continued parallel investment in longerterm,
fundamental research there will be no discoveries to capitalise on.
By their very nature, such discoveries are not predictable and cannot be
prescribed by what the government calls “oriented basic research”.
Equally unpredictable are the areas in which important discoveries will
be made. Basic research should be funded on the criterion of excellence
alone to ensure a credible and sustainable scientific infrastructure.
Ultimately, the critique offered by the signatories to the letter – among
whom were many of the leading scientists working in Ireland, as well as
leading Irish scientists working overseas – was rooted in the belief that
existing policy, whilst understandable in the context of Ireland’s economic
difficulty, would ultimately damage Ireland in the longer term. Writing in
The Irish Times, the science journalist Dick Ahlstrom got to the core of the
matter when he commented:
The scientists who signed the letter are not asking that money be
stripped from applied and translational research and transferred to basic
research. They argue that in order for Ireland to have a fully functioning
research ecosystem, both research areas need funding. Research is a
continuum. It has no artificial barriers dictating it is basic if it sits on one
side of a line and applied if it sits on the other.
Failure to meet the need for balance in the distribution of funding
jeopardizes the very idea of Ireland as a knowledge-led economy and
society. More specifically, it weakens Ireland’s capacity to become a
credible location in which new ideas and knowledge might be generated.
‘We’re in risk of eating our own seedcorn’, says Belfast-born Jocelyn Bell
Burnell, Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford.
Interviewed for this publication in the wake of her appearance at Dublin’s
Inspirefest event in June 2015, Burnell, whose discovery of pulsars in the
1960s is recognised as one of the great astronomical discoveries of the
20 th century, added that without adequate support for basic research ‘you
become dependent on other countries for the ideas that are going to get
applied. So you’re in parasite mode.’ This is neither a sustainable nor a
cost-free strategy. It comes with consequences. While Burnell suspects that
Ireland risks losing some its brightest brains through an overly strong
emphasis on applied funding, she is adamant that Discovery Research is
key not only to the up-skilling of the existing workforce, but to the longterm
goal of attracting young people into science and related fields.
Pointing to her experience in the UK, where the admission system to
university includes a personal statement about why students want to study
a particular discipline, she notes the almost gravitational pull of the
exploratory, open-ended nature of scientific inquiry. ‘We find that in many
of the sciences, it’s things like astronomy, particle physics, quantum physics,
relativity, that turns them on as teenagers and gets them into science in
the first place. And then they go on from there in all sorts of directions -
technology, engineering, computing, and other bits of science.’
The issues raised in national and international discussions about research
policy are not the preserve of any single subject-area, of course. The
discovery Ireland 26,27