I wish to raise the issue of the growing concern in Ireland's academic community with regard to the future of funding for arts, humanities and social science research under the new Research Ireland strategy. Before getting into the details, I note that I come from an arts background. My primary degree was in history, sociology and English, my next was in sociology and I have a doctorate in education, so I am clearly a little biased on this. I really feel the value of the arts, social sciences and humanities in terms of how we are as a country and how we conduct ourselves. That is not to say that I am anti-STEM at all. To balance that off, my husband works in that field, and my son is now doing it in college, so I think we can have a balanced conversation.
It is important that we are not pitting one thing against the other. That is the nub of the issue here. Research Ireland has a finite amount of money, and it can only fund a certain number of things, but value needs to be put on both STEM and the arts, humanities and social sciences. If we look at the background of this, I am bringing it forward because almost 2,000 academics from universities across the country wrote an open letter to The Irish Times expressing the concerns they have with regard to what Research Ireland's current direction appears to be, and that it is towards more industry-focused research, which they feel is undervaluing the arts, humanities and social sciences.
Of course, it is important that we have research that is able to grow the economy and that looks to the technological innovations we will need to have in the future. I have stood in this Chamber several times to talk about what we need from a science perspective because I am also the spokesperson for further and higher education, research, innovation and science - the shortest title of any spokesperson role, I would say. That is not to say that it only has to be that way. We need to make sure that when the industry is funding and leading what we want, it does not take over the other things that are necessary as well.
When people look at the arts and humanities, they think that they are just subjects that you do - they are nice but you will never get a job from that. I note there was a debate recently about getting rid of arts programmes, and I would argue absolutely against that. A lot of the time, when young people leave second level and go to third level, they do not know what they want to do, so a firm basis in general sciences, general arts or other more general degrees is beneficial for them to discover themselves.
To bring that back to the level of research, we need to be able to look, from a social scientific point of view, at what our future world is going to bring to us, what we need to know and what we know now about what is going to happen in the future, so we can build schools, homes and all of those things. That comes from social science. It is not just statistical analysis from a STEM perspective.
The fear of the Postgraduate Workers' Organisation, IFUT and others is that Research Ireland and the Department made these decisions and kind of let them know along the way how things were going to go. That is not consultation; that is just letting someone know. It is a concern that I also have. It is important when things are changing and evolving that people are brought along, not just left to the side and told a couple of weeks beforehand that this is what the changes are going to be. There needs to be a right to be able to challenge that. That is why the open letter has happened.
