Has Ireland’s research prioritisation agenda gone too far again?

In a laboratory at Trinity College Dublin, one of the most cited researchers in the field of cell death still does his imaging using a confocal microscope bought around 2002. Such instruments are typically replaced every four or five years, but Seamus Martin still has the first generation of a product line the manufacturer has since upgraded several times over. 

“We’re just not as competitive,” he said of Irish science. “Most of us are dealing with equipment that we purchased in the late 1990s or early 2000s.” 

More than 10 years ago, Martin, the Smurfit chair of medical genetics at Trinity, was among the organisers of an open letter backed by more than 900 scientists warning that Irish research was facing a “perfect storm”. It criticised “steadily decreasing core grants to universities” and described Ireland’s national research policies as a “short-sighted drive for commercialisable research”.  

Three years earlier, a government panel led by Jim O’Hara, a former general manager of Intel Ireland, had recommended concentrating most competitive research funding into 14 priority areas chosen for their potential to create jobs and attract investment. These included medical devices, diagnostics and therapeutics, data analytics, communications technology, food, renewable energy, advanced manufacturing and new materials. 

The circumstances behind the policy were exceptional. Ireland was still dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, which prompted a huge property and construction bubble to burst and required the country to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the UK.

The scientists said in the letter that while investment in applied science formed “an essential part of an overall strategy to generate economic return from scientific research”, failing to allocate enough to invest in basic research would eventually put Ireland in the situation of having “no discoveries to capitalise on”. 

Across the world, countries are wrestling with how much to focus their research and innovation funding on industrial priorities amid a common perception that the most promising route to economic growth runs through high-tech innovation. The European Union, for example, is currently grappling with the question of how much to focus its own vast multiannual research funding budget, set to be significantly increased from 2028, on projects specifically concentrated on boosting the continent’s industrial competitiveness. In that context, Ireland is an interesting case study, having gone further and earlier than most other Western nations down the road of commercialisation.   

More than a decade on from its original “research prioritisation” exercise, the nation has long recovered from the economic crisis, establishing itself as a major base for multinational technology and pharmaceutical companies. But concerns over the balance between industry-focused research and investigator-led, curiosity-driven work recently flared up again following the 2024 merger of its two main competitive research funders, which previously had different roles. While the Irish Research Council (IRC) funded across disciplines and was an important route for investigator-led research, Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) focused its much larger budget mostly on science and engineering, with an explicit mandate to boost enterprise and economic development.

It was the latter whose narrowing research agenda spooked Irish scientists in 2015, with the agency’s director general, Mark Ferguson, becoming a bête noire in some parts of the Irish research community. Ferguson’s dual roles as director general of SFI and the government’s chief scientific adviser also drew criticism at the time, with some academics and research organisations claiming that the arrangement created a potential conflict of interest. 

But looking back on his decade at SFI, Ferguson, who is now chair of the European Innovation Council’s advisory board, said the focus on key priority areas was necessary at the time. “It’s absolutely the appropriate thing to do because Ireland was in the peak of an economic crisis,” he said. 

“If you look at the criticism of SFI [before the prioritisation exercise] that there had not been any demonstrable economic impact, in part, that was true. In part, it was also a failure of communicating adequately what had gone on. The primary objective was to align the science funding in a way that was likely to contribute in the medium and long term…to Ireland’s recovery,” added Ferguson, who, before taking up the SFI role, had co-founded and run the biotech firm Renovo, spun out of his research at the University of Manchester, where he was dean of biological sciences.

Ferguson said there was validity to the concerns raised by academics but that researchers receiving public money should not regard themselves as “some kind of elite that is going to be funded to do whatever they want, regardless of the circumstances in which they reside…The prioritisation exercise made the academic scientific research community think really hard about the impact or the potential impact of the work. It made them think about how to contribute to Ireland’s economic recovery.” 

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For scientists like Martin, however, the concern was that the priority areas steered researchers away from uncertain but potentially important research avenues. Martin’s main interest is cell death, which has potential importance in oncology, but he had to switch his focus to skin inflammation because it was easier to get funding for it.  

“It was a big shift in focus. We managed to do successful work in that area, but for about five to six years I had to really neglect the main research area I had built an international reputation on,” he said.  

Another established professor at an Irish university, who does not wish to be named and has received funding from Irish research agencies, described a similar experience.  

She was not unsympathetic to the argument that Ireland’s economic crisis demanded research prioritisation, but the extent of it was “really shocking”. Even “excellent” researchers went three or four years without being able to secure funding, which was “catastrophic” for mid-career scientists, she added.  

“That didn’t happen to me because I bent to the system. I managed to keep going – but not with the same confidence, momentum or output,” she said.  

Her laboratory was studying the biology behind compounds that had the potential to become new drugs. The work needed several more years of basic research before it was ready to move towards a product. Instead, she found herself seeking enterprise funding while important scientific questions remained unresolved. 

“If I had spent a few more years to get through the really basic stuff, it would have been much more commercially viable and of economic benefit to Ireland,” she added.

In 2015, an independent review commissioned by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation called research prioritisation “timely and appropriate” during the economic crisis but also raised the scientists’ concerns, warning that the “scarcity of national funding for areas outside” the priorities could leave Ireland unable to respond to “emerging or unforeseen areas of opportunity”. Researchers could also “exit the system”.  

Although less than half of national research expenditure was formally subject to prioritisation, the panel found that it represented the “vast majority” of funding for which researchers could compete. And in 2016, the Irish Research Council said only 4 per cent of national research investment was going to basic frontier research, compared with 17 per cent across Europe. 

Nevertheless, the Irish government refreshed the priority areas for another five years in 2018 and again said that most competitively awarded public research funding would be aligned with them. Ireland was well into economic recovery by then.  

But the government also began creating more routes for researcher-led work. The IRC launched its Laureate Awards in 2017 to address what it described as a significant gap in opportunities for established researchers to conduct frontier basic research across all disciplines. 

SFI followed in 2019 with Frontiers for the Future, which supported investigators pursuing their own research questions, including high-risk, high-reward undertakings, with between €600,000 (£514,000) and €1.5 million offered over four to five years for larger programmes. But Ferguson denied that establishing the frontiers programme amounted to an acknowledgement that the original prioritisation strategy had limitations. Instead, it was “a recognition that the times were changing. As Ireland emerged from the crisis it made sense to change the balance between tightly focused research and frontier work.”

Yet the debate over the balance of funding has persisted even beyond the 2024 merger of SFI and the IRC into Research Ireland, intended to combine the strengths of both organisations and put support for research across the full disciplinary spectrum on a statutory footing. 

The debate currently focuses on Research Ireland’s 2026-30 strategy. In an echo of 2015, more than 2,000 academics and researchers in Ireland have signed an open letter expressing “deep concern” that the strategy is “structurally, rhetorically and materially focused on commercially translatable research and economic impact” at the expense of fundamental, discovery-led research, and the arts, humanities and social sciences (AHSS). 

Peter Clifford, Research Ireland’s head of strategy, said ensuring that research was translated into outcomes that improved economic growth and delivered tangible societal benefits was still a priority because of “storm clouds on the horizon” – referring to geopolitical uncertainty and the Irish economy’s dependence on a small number of mostly American multinational companies. 

“Ireland’s economy needs to strengthen its indigenous enterprise, its small and medium enterprises, its spin-outs and startups resulting from research,” he said, adding that while the country performed strongly in research, it had, like Europe more broadly, been less successful than the US or China in translating discoveries into new companies and jobs.

That said, Clifford emphasised that the pursuit of commercial returns would not crowd out funding for basic research from Science Ireland’s €350 million annual budget. “We’ve committed fully to 50 per cent of our funding going to basic science, curiosity-driven, PI-led activity with no thematic restrictions,” he said, adding that while the other half would be thematic, it would not be spent solely on near-to-market research.

Yet questions remain over how that balance will work in practice – particularly given the impending closure of the Frontiers for the Future scheme, with investigator-led research being funded via a new Investigators Programme open to all disciplines and research types, from curiosity-driven to applied.

The larger Frontiers Awards stream is also being replaced, but Clifford described this programme as a STEM-focused SFI legacy that “needs to be made much less focused on impact” and “more PI-led and curiosity-driven. It needs to be refocused to ensure that excellence is the primary discriminating factor, and…to make sure…that all disciplines and researchers in the country feel that this programme is for them”.  And while the exact size of awards has not been finalised, Clifford estimated that they would be in the region of €1.3 million to €2 million. 

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Another source of controversy is the way Research Ireland has proposed to support PhD students and postdoctoral researchers.  

Previously, scholarships were awarded centrally by the IRC, but under the new strategy they will instead be awarded to universities to distribute, which the protest letter says “undermines the notion of funding excellence in ideas and people regardless of discipline or institution by concentrating awards into institutional priorities”. 

But Clifford rejected the suggestion that the new strategy would amount to a return to research prioritisation in early-career funding, noting that Research Ireland would review universities’ plans and monitor how funding was distributed between disciplines.  

“For example, we’re not going to allow a particular university to go all in on robotics, because that’s not the purpose of the programme,” he said, giving the hypothetical example of limiting an institution to spending no more than 30 per cent of its allocation on robotics. 

“It’s a balancing act. The purpose of the programme is to build autonomy into institutions but also to be balanced across all disciplines and career stages,” he added.  

But Clifford conceded that Research Ireland’s communication with researchers needed to improve.  

“We did a lot of consulting as we were developing the strategy but the open letter has brought to light that the consultation was not enough,” he said. “The main focus of our consultations was with the vice-presidents of research in the institutions, and we’re recognising now [that we] also need to be better at speaking directly to the research community.”  

To increase direct engagement, Research Ireland is developing an advisory council made up predominantly of working researchers. 

Daniel Carey, who chaired the IRC from 2022 to the “amalgamation” with SFI, agreed that Science Ireland “will need to – and knows it needs to – develop its relationship to both fundamental research and AHSS more fully to realise its mission”. And on the proposal to give universities a greater role in allocating PhD and postdoctoral funding, he conceded that the “rational” opportunity it offered for institutions to plan more strategically and build strength in particular areas also “opened the door to prioritisation”.

Therefore, the move needed to be “balanced by a space for open calls that are supportive of fundamental research”, he said, noting that one of the IRC’s defining features was that researchers could compete through national open calls and were free to choose the questions they wanted to pursue: “That’s where the best ideas come from and it’s how you energise the system.”

Rosarii Griffin, who chairs University College Cork’s Research Staff Association, said she had already encountered researchers who were reluctant to pursue some funding opportunities because they believed their proposal would not fit institutional priorities. Most of the examples she had encountered were in the social sciences and humanities, but she stressed that the changes were too recent to quantify. “It’s almost like a deterrent,” she explained.  

Griffin, who is also secretary and board member of the Irish National Researcher Staff Association and secretary and director of the International Consortium of Researcher Staff Associations, said she does not oppose research prioritisation per se, conceding that there may be good reasons to concentrate limited resources on developing expertise in areas such as health, climate or AI. 

The difficulty is knowing in advance where the most important discoveries will come from, she said. “What we really want to see is a fully funded proper research ecosystem that’s balanced: one that supports both mission-oriented and investigator-led work.” 

In Carey’s perception, Research Ireland appears sincere in its commitment to both, and he urged patience from researchers as the fledgling agency irons out the wrinkles in its scientific and communication strategies.  

He said there was an “element of inevitability” about Ireland’s “creation of one funding agency of a scale similar to other European models” once the government created a department specifically responsible for both higher education and research. Previously, the IRC and SFI sat in different departments and had different priorities and legislative remits.  

“The question for all of us in the system,” Carey added, “is whether we can work collaboratively to shape a Research Ireland that is not a Science Foundation Ireland takeover or merger but a hybrid in which we can get the best of both and combine the ethos of both agencies in some powerful way. But it’s still early days for the agency, and this work takes time.”