ALL STATE spending on scientific research is to be treated as if it were a single budget item as and from the next budget, Minister of State for Science Conor Lenihan has indicated.
The decision follows an unintentional 15 per cent cutback in overall research spending that followed last December’s budget, Mr Lenihan said yesterday.
He was speaking in Dublin after the launch of a new €14.8 million research centre, Systems Biology Ireland, to be based at University College Dublin.
Research spending fell by about €140 million in 2008, 15 per cent of the total, he said. The cuts came as departments that invest in research, including enterprise trade and employment, education and agriculture among others, selectively trimmed their allocations for research.
"It was realised at Government level that research and development was something of a casualty in the last estimates," Mr Lenihan told The Irish Times.
“They were done at an individual departmental level, so it wasn’t [seen] until much later that there had been in effect a 15 per cent cut in the research and development spend.”
For this reason, the total spend would be treated as if it were an individual item in the next budget, he said. “It will be treated in the estimates process as a single budget line.”
This would allow the Government to track how each department treats its individual research spending under the normal estimates process.
The decision mirrors but does not actually take up a McCarthy report recommendation that responsibility for all State science spending be taken over by a single department.