Funding for Research in Institutions of Higher Learning in Ireland

Much of the discussion attempting to explain Ireland's economic success in recent years has focused on a number of factors. ¹ In addition to industrial development policy, fiscal and public expenditure policy, European Union membership, educational development have all been seen as important. Certainly successive Irish governments has persisted in developing participation in secondary and post secondary education. Yet, research in higher education institutions has to some extent been the cinderella of academic activities. This has now changed. After many years of talk, many years of plans and pilot schemes, a large amount of money is being provided for research not only in the universities and in higher education institutions, but also in public sector bodies and in the economy generally. The extent of the resources and the scale and nature of the programs being initiated would have been unthinkable not only a generation ago, or fifteen years ago during the long recession of the 1980s, but even five or six years ago. These developments in higher education, and elsewhere in the economy and society, hold out great promise for Ireland.

Universities in particular, and higher education institutions generally, have always insisted that they have a two-fold function: teaching and research. Conventional wisdom has it that one could not be a good teacher in higher education without being engaged in research to discover new knowledge or, at least scholarship in the sense of keeping up with one's subject. That some doubt has been cast on this assumption in recent times—and, indeed, that teaching may suffer on account of involvement not to say absorption in research—cannot be denied. But, given that in recent years doctoral studies have more and more become the entry qualification for academic posts, or that they are expected to have been completed before promotion from the junior lecturer level, the close involvement of research with teaching in higher education is obvious. Certainly in Ireland's higher education system, and in the systems we to some extent model ourselves on, the opportunity to carry out research has always been considered important whether by way of time being made available for research or by a well founded laboratory or other resources. The annual reports of presidents of Irish universities for many years have featured academic publication of articles or books by staff. In more recent years this information has been augmented by participation in conferences or other activities at which papers are presented. This shows the greater importance being given to research and the perception at the top that it is important for an institution to have a comprehensive involvement in research.

Models of higher education in which research features strongly are drawn either from Germany, whose universities feature the Humboldt model of the research-based chair, or from the United States, where the graduate school approach has always been advanced as something to emulate. Until the 1970s, the Irish research system was mainly characterized by such public research organizations as An Foras Talúntais (the Agricultural Institute), the Institute for Industrial Research and Standards, the Economic and Social Research Institute, and the Medical Research Council—all somewhat divorced from the higher education system.

To the public mind of the time, that seemed the best way to advance research-focused research organizations with a clearly identifiable aim in mind. The main emphasis was considered to be the applied and the utilitarian. Research as an end justified in itself was not really understood as a concept. Public funding of "curiosity research" would have been seen as laughable. University researchers generally kept a low profile and worked away as best they could, their main purpose and perhaps justification being in specialist postgraduate education. Most postgraduate education for Irish students was obtained in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Financing of Irish universities from the Exchequer until the 1980s was based on block grants for both teaching and research. The insistence on...