Higher Education No R&D?
June 23, 2023
Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science of Ireland, Simon Harris, interviewed earlier this week on RTE Radio 1, left me with more questions, than answers.
For example, I wondered what powers has he arrogated to himself regarding provision of on-campus student housing partnerships with universities?
The Land Development agency scuttled developments held up from county councils all across the country, many of them still locked into interminable delays over planning and other issues.
It’s curious, he has taken on what Dept of Housing supposedly has the required expertise to do.
According to the above chart, would i be correct in saying, beside us on the chart, Croatia and Lithuania proportionally now spend more than us on R&D, that we spend a third less compared to 2011, while those countries exceed what they spent in 2011..?
Unfortunately, no such questions were asked of him.
We’re down near the bottom of the table for expenditure on R&D. Harris doesn’t have any plans, it seems to change that. It’s probably true, most of that spend comes from the business sector, not the public sector.
“The inaugural Ireland’s Innovation Index report shows that for Ireland to raise itself to the level of ‘innovation leaders’ in the European Innovation Scorecard, the government would need to increase RD&I spending from €950m to €1.8bn, or from 0.43% of GNI* to 0.8%.
And to match the likes of Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands and Belgium, total RD&I expenditure in 2021 would have to have been €2.2bn higher at just under €7bn, rather than the reported figure of €4.7bn.”
Nah, they did not ask him anything about plans to increase R&D spend eg in our universities.
According to the above infographic our spend on R&D is approx half the EU average(2)
We should be spending approx 2bn/yr on R&D increasing tax credit to 50% and making the grant application simpler eg this innovative site https://bit.ly/3NovxJR
According to his bio “He initially studied Journalism and French, at the Dublin Institute of Technology, but dropped out in first year.”(4)
Harris does not appear to have any of the credentials suited to innovative expansion of our Higher Education and R&D sector.
Not long ago, UCD shelved plans to construct 1200 student accommodation citing doubling of construction costs and unrealistic bids. We’ll have to wait and see what proposals Harris can bring to the table in terms of government/UCD partnership to get such a project off the ground. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Further delays grip the National Children’s Hospital (5) New date for completion is May 2024. Arguably, the hospital is heading to be the costliest White Elephant Children’s Hospital ever built globally.
Certain aspects of the project are worrisome, one earlier link stating the hospital 80% complete, the other, 70%. We hope it’s not going backwards.
All beds are designed for single occupancy rooms? Who is going to staff them, where will the staff live? Surely, larger occupancy dorms are more suited to some situations?
Concerns over visitors getting through to the hospital in rush hour remain, especially visitors from out of town.
Why periphery of the city not chosen, beggars belief, so much easier to build. You could have built a park on adjoining land.
No doubt it suited some with power to suit themselves, not the public.
Let’s wait and see.
Till again…
1. https://businessplus.ie/news/rdi-spend/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Harris_(politician)
5. https://www.newstalk.com/news/td-concerned-of-further-delays-to-national-childrens-hospital-1467788
6. https://www.irishtimes.com/health/2022/11/17/inside-the-national-childrens-hospital-a-sneak-preview/
‘Housing for All’ Scam
June 2, 2023
Recently, An Tanaiste, Micheál Martin, Min for Defence, Min for Foreign Affairs, erstwhile An Taoiseach, appearing on the last Late Late Show hosted by Ryan Tubridy trotted out the usuals “We’re turning the corner on housing…” https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/micheal-martin-says-ireland-turning-corner-on-house-building-1447722.html
Ireland’s Housing For All Policy listed here https://www.fiannafail.ie/housingforall
Fianna Fail ministers regularly trot out the “..The Tánaiste noted that 30,000 new homes were built last year, 14,000 more than the previous year, and in January there were more than 2,000 commencements, the highest since records began.”
Those of us flabber-gasted at the current price of houses and lack of corresponding purchasing opportunities for our young people, astounded at the astronomical rates of homelessness, wonder if Michael is telling us porkies like those told by Squealer “fictional character, a pig, in George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm. He serves as second-in-command to Napoleon and is the farm’s minister of propaganda.” https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=Squealer+from+George+Orwell
A recent study comparing construction costs between various EU countries, UK and Ireland found costs 20% less in UK though arguments state the study was not like for like, extra costs e.g. fitting out the house increase costs for Ireland.
Minister for Housing, Darragh O’Brien, in the opening sentence in the foreword to this report writes,
“Housing for All, commits that the
housing system needs to be placed on a long-term
economically sustainable footing. Thankfully, supply –
key to addressing Ireland’s housing needs – is
increasing and Housing for All is having a real impact.
More homes are being built and bought than in a
generation.”
“long-term economically sustainable footing”….I’ll return to this comment, nb see “Financial Stability Pact” below.
Micheál Martin in his appearance with Ryan Tubridy stated that Sinn Féin did not like Europe, meaning the EU.
It is curiously perhaps the only reason I might not vote for Sinn Féin next election is my perception that they are very supportive of our membership of the EU, so I was quite taken aback by that remark.
Ireland’s Housing and Construction sector is in such a complete mess that if policies are not changed, it will significantly worsen and deepen over the coming years. Rather than ‘Housing for All’, housing in Ireland is heading for Skid Row, Los Angeles, USA perhaps the largest number of homeless concentrated in one place in the USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_Row,_Los_Angeles
Much like propaganda delivered in George Orwell’s 1984, Martin and FF/FG spread the word, ‘Black is White’; according to them, great job, great progress being made. That it would require a combined income of €175,000 to buy a 4 bedroom semi in an average Dublin suburb is meaningless to them. Exorbitant costs of rent only apartments affordable by many foreigners unaffordable to the average industrial wage.
Their policy to meet rising costs of insufficient units produced by the private housing sector, is to help first-time buyers with subsidies to match the shortfall inflated price, thus driving up the cost of homeownership as developers pocket these subsidies.
We joined the EU in 1973 https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/inter-parliamentary-work/european-union/brief-history/
The Irish people voted against the Nice Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Nice that could have led us out of the EU
In 2008 Irish people voted against the Lisbon Treaty https://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/en/analyses/why-did-the-irish-reject-lisbon-an-analysis-of-referendum-results-ari/
In 2012 Irish people voted in favour of ‘The Fiscal Stability Pact’
https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/inter-parliamentary-work/european-union/brief-history/
“Title III of the Treaty established a series of fiscal rules, known as the Fiscal Compact. These rules oblige contracting parties to maintain a balanced budget (defined as a budget deficit not exceeding 3% of GDP) and introduces a requirement that a state’s structural deficit does not exceed a country-specific medium-term budgetary objective (MTO), or is on a path to meeting this objective.”
The Fiscal Advisory Council was set up to monitor the above.
You want to know why government is not pushing into the spending required to establish a statewide construction sector that built housing here in Ireland in the 1950’s and earlier, it’s simply because we are constrained by ‘Fiscal Space’ and budgetary rules we signed up to in ‘The Fiscal Stability Pact’.
Instead, because we are an EU vassal state, we must keep within the Fiscal Rules, however deeply totalitarian you deem them to be. So investment in housing must come from the private sector, not the state, though the sums mentioned by FF/FG would have you believe their 4 billion euro is sufficient for this, it’s not. Instead, they meet with open arms big pots of money from cuckoo funds to build unaffordable rent only apartments. No help with homeownership there, though FF/FG claim rented only apartments can be designated for statistical purposes as ‘homes’ in order to inflate underachieving statistics.
Infrastructural development of our Health Service and Education is limited by those same rules.
You wonder at the vast amounts of monies unspent by government and the low numbers of social housing built to date. You might ask why ‘Ireland’s Ghost Estates’ are not being built to help with our housing crisis, look no further https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/0125/1351805-ghost-estates-celtic-tiger/
Unfortunately, our disastrous membership of the EU has brought with it other unfortunate consequences for this state. You believed membership of the EU would bring stability? You might have expected our housing crisis would not happen as you looked to other members including Germany and Nordic countries, but it is what it is, despite this membership.
Furthermore, you might have thought membership of the EU would bring financial stability, but we were and still are with debts circa 230billion named, as one of the PIGS with Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain that led the financial crash in 2008. Instead of stability, European Central Bank with lack of regulation led to the collapse of Irish banks with giveaway lending.
Our financial gain has come through FDI investment in Ireland, FDI exports worldwide, not to only EU. Lack of a financial transaction tax means current Corporation Tax that should rightfully go to other countries to help them, instead goes here, vast amounts of it nearly 20% of current tax take from three only of the largest of these corporations.
Are you still in favour of our membership of the EU? Would we perhaps have done better if we negotiated an All Ireland settlement with the UK and became a member of the Commonwealth?
Lack of some basic knowledge on Economics leads people to think banks deposit their holdings into a safe to be held for them ready for withdrawal. Banks are required to keep a certain amount on reserve, but the vast majority of their holdings get invested elsewhere, eg in US Treasury bonds.
Such investments in today’s world of increasing tax rates and inflation would need to be liquidated to generate the finance for large infrastructural development, but the return on such investments might not cover the large amounts required to kick-start a massive public sector investment programme. Banks could lose money that might risk their so-called ‘stability’.
The ECB is terrified that a large run on deposits in Irish banks could lead to a collapse of the European banking sector, should a domino effect occur.
It would appear that the financial anaconda of the EU, threatened by instability brought about by possible large infrastructural development of Ireland in favour of its citizens, will not happen.
It’s the job of Micheál Martin, Leo Varadkar to tell us all that, ‘black is white’, build confidence in the mess we’re in. They are indeed well able to make any mess bigger.
Yes, we were right to vote against Maastricht and Lisbon. Ireland’s membership of the EU has been a disaster; housing disaster gets bigger by the day, homeless figures rising again.
Till again,
Colmbrazel's Blog 