I think I should allow myself first to regret that we have not had more discussion of this Bill. I am not referring to the Opposition in that regard but to the House as a whole. It seems awful that if there were politics or conflict involved we would have plenty of contributions.
This is a profoundly important Bill. Part of our weakness in the area of science and technology is that the public—in this instance the public as represented by Deputies on all sides— are not as convinced of its importance as I am. On the other hand, although we have not had a lengthy debate I have been very interested in the points made. I have been interested that Deputy O'Malley who by training I understand is not a scientist still seems to have the feel of what this is all about. I will not always be able to agree with the points he made but they were all serious ones and I will try to answer them seriatim.
One theme arose from the Deputy's disappointment at the delay of two years. He talked about the appropriate form of institution, the power it should have and the possibilities of conflict. Those threads all hang together through what he said. He said he was disappointed it took so long and so am I. This Bill is not enormous but part of the reason for that was precisely a reason of discussion, explanation, persuasion and reassurance so that people in existing organisations with existing identities and boundaries did not feel threatened, did not feel a gauleiter for science was going to come along, cutting across departmental boundaries and wrecking things. It was not the complexity but the need to convince people, often with patient discussion and explanation, that this was the best way of doing it.
I am sorry it took that length of time. The great danger is that we produce not more co-ordination which we need, but confusion, chaos, wreckage and hostility. I have said before that I get more insight into the workings of the body politic and of the economic system from my knowledge of animal behaviour than I do from reading history or biography. Where you have an existing institution of any kind, whether it is a political party, a Government department, a scientific institution, a theatre or a farm, there is always a sense of defending its independence and boundaries. There is always a little ritualised, hopefully only that, conflict at the boundary with other organisations. This keeps everybody on his toes and is not a bad thing but very easily it can get out of hand and have a non-productive conflict.
Scientists and technologists are like everybody else. Science permeates everything. We come back to the question of who should present this Bill. The argument was made and was accepted by our predecessors that this should be in the Department of Finance. That had a certain logic. Since the Department of Education are so profoundly involved in science, especially in the teaching rather than in the application of technology to the economy, you could say it should be there. You could say it should be in the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries; that is where our greatest need is and in the past it is where there has been our greatest effort. You could say having regard to what is happening in communications throughout the world it should be in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. They have important communication information network inputs into any scientific effort. You could say it could be in the Department of Transport and Power because there is a tremendous amount of science and technology there. All of those arguments have an aspect of truth. It has to be put somewhere. There is also the argument that it should be put in the Department of the Taoiseach since it applies to everybody and there is some sense in that.
I am happy to affirm a personal interest in science and technology. I have spent my life in a certain area of it and I am very interested in the application of technology to economic change but it was not simply a question of my personal interest. It was that the crucial thing was to get existing and new knowledge to bear on the economy. It was the relationship between the economy and the scientific and technological knowledge that was crucial. Therefore, it was science and technology in the service of economic progress that was the crucial thing. It seemed to us that perhaps the Department that had responsibility for industrial development, although not for agricultural development, was as appropriate a place as any and more appropriate than most.
Deputy O'Malley said he did not think the objectives could be faulted; the question was how they were to be attained. I am afraid there is no magic about this, there is no enormous speed. We have had the predecessors of the NBST, the National Science Council, functioning since 1968 with some people to whom I was very happy to pay generous tribute. They were good people and they worked very well. What they have done is to build policy slowly and to build interconnections slowly because if you try to have the dramatic plucking of certain major targets out of the air your chances of doing wrong are very great indeed. If you try to rush the formation of interconnections and trust between people, then you produce the opposite of what you want to achieve. You produce fragmentation and distrust and you make the work very hard. The task is very much a co-ordinational one. For the benefit of Deputy O'Malley and the benefit of people generally who need reassurance, perhaps I should refer now to what I said in my opening statement.
The board may itself engage in activities, but that is subject to the approval of the Minister. One of my principal concerns in this connection will be that it should not undertake activities which could more appropriately be carried out by another institution.
When we are searching in an nonpartisan way for the best methods we have to be very, very careful to avoid duplication. Let me give a specific example of what I mean : I was very happy and interested in watching and commenting and, indeed, at one time in broadcasting in the formative days of the Institute of Agriculture. This organisation has done an immense amount of good. I admire its vitality, its courage and the quality of its work. They have a momentum, and esprit and an individuality of their own. Their preoccupation is that this new thing coming along, answerable to another Minister, will in some way undermine their unity. Now that is a very real preoccupation and it is one I understand. We have seen examples all over the world of people setting up competing institutions in the same areas and frittering away funds.
The task is one of planning, co-ordinating and disseminating. Those right at the coalface, if I may use that expression, of scientific discovery or new technological application should be in those institutions, be they third level, be they the pure institutions, be they laboratories in individual departments, or be they, as I would wish them to be, in the industrial workshops where knowledge can be used to make a better product, improve a product or make a cheaper product, so that the application, participation and practice of the development of science and technology permeates the whole of our economy, industrial and agricultural, public and private.
I agree with Deputy O'Malley that we have to find the best possible division between the public and private sector and we have to see that we do not add a false relationship where people in the private sector wait for things to be done for them and feel they can call on institutions to do things for them. The received information from outside one's own factory, or one's own science or one's own particular discipline in agriculture is never as good as what is generated indigenously. We do not have to have centres of generation of knowledge. We have to have technological change by the application of science permeating everything and it ought to permeate the Department of Posts and Telegraphs just as much as it ought to permeate a farm, a creamery, the way that my Department manages its documentation, or the way that people make motor cars. It is simply a way of approaching problems and, if you isolate into particular places and think you can do the job in particular places rather than permeating the whole of the economic structure, then you are less efficient.
We could establish new structures too easily and if we establish them as generators in new science or new technology then we would be precisely producing a sort of conflict and chaos and duplication and, therefore, the sort of waste of resources we should avoid in a poor country. This is something against which Deputy O'Malley correctly warned. That is a danger but, with this structure and with these guidelines and, may I add, with the selection of people for the new board we can, I think, avoid that. It is a small board. Ten, by our standards, is small. I profoundly believe that if you genuflect towards every interest group—you do not exactly say "Send us a nominee"; you more or less say "Give us a few names" and they give two or three, and it is Buggins' turn, and you get 25 people—then you get a sort of grey result. They do not work very well and I personally do not like that sort of board. If one wants a board to act and change things it has to be cohesive and quite small so that it will not break into subgroups or sub-boards. I would add the proviso that it has to be chosen in a totally non-partisan way on the basis of excellence. It has to represent the private and the commercially-oriented sector just as much as the public and educational one because we are concerned with that bridge and with the pushing out of scientific knowledge into all sectors of our whole economic system.
We can, I think, agree about the bias Deputy O'Malley mentioned in our educational system. Again, I do not want to talk about him being a lawyer but, coming from that side of the division between Science and the Arts, if I may put it that way, then I am particularly happy here because we have looked on the workplace and technology as somehow being less respectable than some of the older professions. We have done that to our detriment and we have skewed the balance of our syllabus in our secondary education with those preconceptions in mind to our detriment and there is now a wide recognition that that is a mistake. There is excellence and there is the reward of skilful work in a particular area in which one labours and this ought to be the situation in a properly oriented society where people are mobile and get away from snobbery and do not attach greater respectability to one avocation as compared with another. We are moving towards that. It is a liberating development.
I am not going to go into the question of the NIHE in Limerick in any detail. It was mentioned by Deputy O'Malley. I will not try to avoid mentioning it completely because this gives me the opportunity again to point out a danger and to make a clarification. If the NBST, through the science budget, were to be the supreme arbiter —Deputy O'Malley asked who is to predominate—in the area of third level technological education and if they were to predominate you would have a formula for total chaos and for a war between two Departments and this Bill would not have come in in two years or maybe 22 years. What we have done, I think sensibly and practically, with the difficulty of definition at the boundary, as there often is a boundary, is to say that those aspects of any 2nd, 3rd or 2½ level, like the regional technical colleges, of what they do which are educational are the responsibility of the Minister for Education and this board and myself, as Minister, have no say and want no say. In those matters which are matters of research, particularly the sort of research that involves technological application, we have responsibility. That is where the dividing line is.
I have been a teacher and a researcher. Good teaching requires that a bit of research goes on and good teaching sometimes brings pupils into the research. It is not a perfectly clear-cut dividing line, but then neither are many of the other dividing lines we operate quite successfully from time to time. We are not trying to be gauleiters over the universities, third level institutions or regional technical colleges because we do not need new institutions at all. What we need is co-ordination and we need an overall view so that rational planning can be done. If people will not do the co-ordination and the rational planning voluntarily because they recognise the common good and because the whole contour of the problem is set out for them, there is no way we can coerce them to do it. To set up a new super-institution to force them to do it would not be any good either and would smash a lot of existing institutions which have their own traditions, momentum and disciplines and with which I do not think one should lightly interfere.
For the record, I want to indicate a difference in emphasis in my thinking about the NIHE Limerick. Deputy O'Malley referred to it as our principal third level technological institution and mentioned third level technological education. We inherit a past where the binary system operated, where we had a technological strand and an academic strand. The agreed educational policy is that we move away from the binary system, not in disruptive, sudden, hasty or coercive ways, but by long-term planning, by agreement and by the evolution of institutions. I am convinced that we ought not to at third level make the division into technological and other. The people who are doing a technological thing in their working day would benefit from being educated and going to debating societies, dances and other curricular and extra-curricular social activities that go on in third level institutions, and by mixing with people of the other disciplines. The separating of the technological strand from the rest is the perpetuation of the two cultures which we can see has come into existence, for example, in the United Kingdom and has done a great deal of damage.
Although there are great institutions in the world, like Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which have done superb things in the development of science and technology, the evolution even of those institutions, however they came into existence and whatever they are called, is towards making them into balanced third level organisations, putting in the Arts, if it was purely technological in the past, or, if it was purely an Art place, putting in some technology. We need to break down that separation. There are different ways of working, but culture is an entity.
I have probably spoken as a Minister more often in NIHE Limerick than in any other third level institution in Ireland, including the university of which I am a staff member. I feel great interest and excitement in this development. I regret that exigencies has prevented its funding and growth as rapidly and as generously as I would have wished. I can see no other conflict with any other Minister or Department if I say that. I would not like to think of it developing forever with the target of remaining even the best third level technological institution in the country. I would like to think of it not accepting that one half of the binary system but of being a total third level institution.
I have to have a role in third level institutions through responsibility for science and the Institute of Agriculture, but that does not make me either the Minister for Education or the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries. I do not want to be nor do I want to usurp any of their powers. Were I to try to do so I would make this sort of progress impossible. I would wreck the whole thing. What I can do is try to produce co-ordination, the flow of knowledge and the evolution of policies. If that becomes coercive or an effort to build an empire, or to grab responsibility from one Department for something they have built up, then it becomes self-defeating.
Deputy O'Malley asked me to interest myself in the NIHE Limerick and I reaffirm my interest. I am not reaffirming it, or never did affirm it, in conflict with any other Department or any other Minister. The possibility of conflict is inherent in the ministerial system. We are 15 people. We have demarcation disputes between Departments all the time. If any of us in this or any other Government is dotty enough to drive those to the point of destruction, it is perfectly easy to smash the whole thing. We have seen instances of that in other countries in recent times. One must assume a certain modicum of common sense on the part of all the participants. If that is denied or somebody is getting paranoid, of course it does not work.
Let me come back to the science budget because this raises the same question. If we gather into a single document all the expenditure, then we can see the strengths and gaps, we can see the wood as well as the trees, and strategy as well as tactics. If we present that to a Government and to an Oireachtas, hopefully there will be debate, growing understanding, what we are overdoing and what we are not doing at all. We will get our balance, our expenditure and money better, and avoid duplication.
For all those reasons as a management to, an understanding to, a planning to the preparation of a science budget, is a very useful thing. That half is positive. But think in real terms. Were I to say that in regard to the expenditures for research on communications I wanted to do them and not the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, or in regard to the Institute of Agriculture I wanted to do it and not the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, or in regard to educational research or economic and social research, which seems to me to be a part of science, that I wanted them, or in regard to energy research that I wanted to move in on the Minister for Transport and Power in the ESB, and Bord Gáis, the Nuclear Energy Board and so on, all I would do is disrupt government and make the enactment of this Bill impossible.
In a sense I would like to say that I would be happy to do it but I would not really be happy, because I know perfectly well I could not do it. I know too that the effort to do it would be simply disruptive and would defeat the first half of my intention with the science budget, which is to see the whole area and to enable strategy to evolve. It must be remembered that that does not evolve in Government Departments or in the heads of Ministers. That will evolve in the board. They are the people who will have to evolve it slowly.
While I understand the wish that says : "Yes, push the science budget beyond being a record and a planning device, so that instead of doing the funding through the individual Votes of individual Ministers you do it collectively in a single science budget". My answer is that that would not work. There would be terrible difficulties deciding what was and what was not science. If it were done that way, it is clear where the Institute of Agriculture should go. There are other activities of a research kind embedded in the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries. That is the Department I speak about most because I knew most about it when I was not a politician. Where do you separate some of the things of a research character that are done within the structure of that Department? That observation applies to many other Departments.
I am not unsympathetic to that idea in theory, but in practice it would produce the opposite to what Deputy O'Malley and I wish, namely, instead of producing cohesion, co-ordination and a calm overview so that you could spot the priorities and the weaknesses, and correct the weaknesses, it would be productive of the sort of conflicts we both want to avoid.
There are a few smaller points to which I wish to refer. Regarding the Patents Office, I agree with the Deputy's observations; but in saying that I am not in any way criticising the people who have worked hard there. The system is one that has built up during a long period but it has performed too slowly. I am not apportioning the blame for this to individuals but it is a fair description of the situation. However, I am glad to be able to tell the Deputy that a reform is in hand which, it is hoped, will overcome the weaknesses that he identifies correctly—the weakness of delay and, consequently of discouragement. We are well advanced in having the situation put right.
On the question of finance from the private sector, it is the situation in America that not only can scientific and technological research be funded to a large extent from the private sector but that country's funds are so vast and their benefactors so thick on the ground that it is possible to fund universities privately. In our situation that is something that is unthinkable. Apart from that consideration I have a firm belief that those companies which have some cash to spare—and this means only that they are profitable and the more profitable they are the better from the point of view of their growth and re-equipment—should be encouraged to plough back that cash into the business rather that to be told to give it for the use of others. Deputy O'Malley said that there is almost no help given via the tax laws. While the help given may not be specifically towards science there are write-offs and allowances of a reasonably generous kind for activities which are chargeable within the present tax laws. I am glad that this situation exists and I am not claiming it to be an innovation of ours. Therefore to suggest that no help is given in that area is not true. Expenditures which can be written off are best spent within the company on product development and on technology transfer but it might be worth considering the point Deputy O'Malley makes regarding the private individual who after a lifetime of commercial success wishes to do something useful by donating money. While I am not Minister for Finance I would imagine that what the Deputy has in mind would not cost very much in terms of lost funds but might produce some money for areas in which we would like to help.
To return to the question of conflicts and contradictions in priorities, Deputy O'Malley referred to there being no provision in the Bill as to who was to be the predominant figure in decision making. It is right that there is no such information available because if any one Minister were to predominate, we would have chaos and confusion. The task of the board is that of planning, co-ordinating and conciliating. This job involves interchanges and these, in turn, involve correlation, the avoidance of conflict, of duplication and of waste resources of people and money. Consequently, it is not the job of any Minister to predominate at the decision centre. Certainly, the Minister for Education has a role. So has the Minister for Finance and other interested Ministers. Somebody must take formal responsibility but he must resist the temptation to use that responsibility at the expense of other people. There is no person who will predominate in this case in the sense of one Minister vis-à-vis another. Neither is there any contradiction in priorities except to the extent that between different Departments there are always contradictions.
Of course, the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries would like to be given more resources for development. I, too, would like more money for the development of industry. The Minister for Education must fight his corner. The same goes for all the other Ministers, but the Minister for Finance must stop all our spending enthusiasm. As a human being each Minister will regard his Department as having priority, but as a politician as well as a human being each must reconcile that with the needs of his colleagues and of the Government as a whole. It is the same as running a family or a business. I have been in the universities all my life and I have never yet met a university teacher who did not consider his subject to be the most important of all subjects taught at the university. Neither have I ever met a school-teacher who did not consider his subject to be the most important on the curriculum. However, that does not prevent people from getting on with each other or from getting on with the work. The way that we avoid conflict is by the sort of mechanism we have set up. Were this mechanism to have more power, which is what Deputy O'Malley seemed to be saying, it would be less effective because it would produce precisely those conflicts that we are all anxious to avoid.
I have not been convinced by Deputy O'Malley's arguments, like the argument, for example, that I should strengthen the science budget and do it as a single Minister rather than to spread it among all the Departments. However, we have some time yet as we shall not be seeking the remaining Stages of this Bill today. It would be hasty to do so. Having said that I am not one to rule out the idea that Deputies across the floor can improve Bills so if the Deputy is not pleased with what I have said we can consider amending the Bill at Committee Stage. In fairness, though, I should point out that on balance he has not convinced me and that to do as he suggests would produce an end result opposite to the one for which we both wish.
