IRELAND cannot aspire to be "a knowledge based economy" with high quality employment and good pay, unless funding for university research is significantly increased, a report concludes.
The report, carried out by the Circa Group of consultants for the Higher Education Authority, says university research funding is currently the lowest in Europe. Irish people have not appreciated "the competitive advantage which universities of international quality can confer on a nation," it observes.
A doubling of research funding would put Ireland above Greece, Spain and Portugal, but it would still be well behind the more developed EU economies, most of which invest three or four times more in research.
As a first step in a major restructuring of Irish higher education research, the study recommends an initial £20 million increase in State funding.
It also recommends that the HEA should establish research councils to allocate funds to universities.
The report is particularly critical of funding for basic science research. It calls the Forbairt/Eolas support schemes in this area "derisory in volume terms; a type of tokenism".
However, the report stresses that increased State funding is "not a one way street" and there must be greater accountability and transparency by the universities.
It notes that most Irish universities were unable to provide "even the most rudimentary outline of their current research capabilities and strengths" for the Circa study.
This was an "indictment of present arrangements" and evidence of their unsuitability to compete with European universities, which regard their research performance as their strongest competitive advantage.
Irish universities are a "low accountability environment. The quality of research performance is quite dismal."
The consultants note that virtually all the European universities they visited now separate their teaching and research budgets. None of the Irish colleges did this, and all were resistant to the idea.
"We find it difficult to understand how the universities can adequately plan for the development of their research activities, if they cannot disentangle research from the range of other activities which staff engage in, if nobody seems to know where research funds are being spent, where the growth areas for research are, if the financial resourcing of specific areas of research activity cannot be monitored and planned and if the resources cannot be switched from one area to another."