Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 15 July 2025
1039. Deputy Eoghan Kenny asked the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science for an update as of July 2025 on the Programme for Government commitment to continue to provide and broaden funding for research bodies or institutions which have an independent cross-border studies agenda; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [39532/25]
View answerThe Deputy may be aware that my Department, through the Higher Education Authority and Research Ireland, has leveraged the Shared Island fund to establish collaborative research programmes under the first call of the North-South Research Programme. This amounted to €37 million. A further €70 million has been allocated to the establishment of two Co-centres for Research on a North-South and East-West basis. Both of these major initiatives have been delivered in close collaboration with key stakeholders in Northern Ireland and across the rest of the UK.
Last year, the HEA issued a second Call for Proposals under the North-South Research Programme, and €16 million has been set aside for this. The report of the Expert Assessment Panel is just recently available and I anticipate that a formal announcement of the results will be made shortly.
Finally, the feasibility of a third co-centre was discussed in the context of the recent Ireland-UK summit between the Taoiseach and the British Prime Minister. Given that this innovative collaborative model is a recent development, my intention is to assess the impact and effectiveness of the two existing co-centres once they have been performing for an appropriate period of time and to take the learning from this assessment into consideration of the further development of the co-centres model.
