Though the business expenditure on R&D is growing very quickly here, such research is largely confined to a very small number of large companies in a few areas. By and large, the multinationals present in Ireland do no research work here. Production lines are easy to move, but research facilities are not, as Galway discovered some years ago when Digital closed its production line but not its research facility.

Because of this absence of investment in "normal" science (either in industry or in public), we do not have the things that other normal countries take for granted – a thriving postgraduate and postdoctoral (fourth-level) training system, a thriving and innovative scientific culture, large-scale and ongoing interactions between third-level institutions and industry at all sizes, from fledgling campus enterprises to large multinationals. Normal in the sense that all of competitor countries have such a system. Normal in the sense that investment in science is recognised by our competitors as perhaps the most important investment that they can make in their futures. Normal in the sense that the best work is funded on the basis of a transparent, peer-reviewed system driven by excellence and innovation. Normal in the sense that our competitors accept that such investment pays off dramatically over time scales that are unrecognisable by the exigencies of the next election. Normal in the sense that they accept that such investment costs money, but is worth it. Instead, we have scientific groups which are run on shoestring funds, and agencies who disburse tiny S&T budgets; budgets which would be absorbed in toto by a single medium-sized research group abroad. In essence, without a proper investment in public S&T, Ireland is conducting a huge experiment with its future. It is the wrong experiment and there can be only one outcome – and that outcome will happen, not in ten years or five years but as soon as our worth as a manufacturing base is exhausted. We will have nothing to replace it if we do not take action now.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted a survey of the impact of research carried out by its staff and concluded that:

It is no coincidence that MIT should be so successful: it invests $1.2 billion in research every year. It is no surprise that the bulk of the world’s great research universities sit squarely in the richest regions of the world’s richest country. This is also true of the other smaller but wealthy countries that we would like to emulate.

So how do we pay for this investment? We can no longer rely on Brussels and so must climb up on to our own two feet. No matter how difficult we find this initially, standing on our own two feet, without the begging bowl of old, will be an exhilarating position to be in. The answer is simple – we must invest from our own resources, and this will cost us money. If we accept that this investment is a necessity, forced upon us by our decision to move to a knowledge-based economy with the demands on intellectual capital that this makes, then we have to make radical choices about resource allocation now. We must implement programmes of investment in research that maximise human intellectual potential. The future payoffs will be enormous and unpredictable. It is as likely to come from developments in the brain and cognitive sciences, as it is from investment in nanochemistry. Just think, for example, of the world markets that exist for rational drug treatments for common diseases that are currently without a cure, such as Alzheimer’s Disease.

There is widespread acceptance across the political spectrum that the role of the Government in respect of state enterprise is changing – the government can either be owner or be regulator of such enterprises, but not both. Neither can these enterprises be protected as monopoly service providers, as occurred in the past. Telecom Éireann has been sold, yet the "public" debate about what we will do with the proceeds of such privatisations or decentralisations of state-ownership has not really started. Is paying off the much diminished National Debt the only viable option?

We think not and suggest here that a permanent gift to our future would be to use the proceeds of the privatisation of Telecom Éireann (say five billion pounds – about 4% of GNP) to invest in a Millennium Innovation Fund. This fund, perhaps to be managed by the National Treasury Management Agency, would have several purposes. It would generate income, it would secure a permanent investment in brain power through public basic and strategic science programmes, broadly conceived from the social through the biological to the physical sciences. Such a fund would work rather like the Wellcome Trust in the UK (which incidentally funds more biomedical research in Ireland than we do ourselves) or a large pension fund; generating and sustaining its own capital base and income stream.

At the moment Ireland’s public S&T effort is largely funded through transfers from the EU. The Germans, French, Danes etc. invest in Irish science; Ireland, by and large, does not. This fund will be used to replace the funding of science that will be lost to the country on the loss of EU structural funding. This fund will provide a future-proofed means of permanently secured research funding indefinitely into the future, a true gift from this generation to its own grandchildren and their grandchildren.

Over a period of a few years, the fund will grow, and the increased income stream can be used to further enhance the productive, innovative and research capacity of the economy. We will be able to retain our best and brightest whom we educate to degree level but who are lost to us when they go to seek intellectually stimulating postgraduate opportunities abroad. We will be able to attract the best and brightest from other countries (as proposed by the Irish Council for Science Technology and Innovation Foresight Exercise) to our third-level institutions and benefit from their presence in our economy – something that occurs in our normal competitor countries (who, incidentally, are benefiting from the presence of Irish graduates in their economies).

Does Ireland want to be a leader or a follower? We think we have been living in the dust of others for long enough. It is time to build the road ahead.