Vol. 467 No. 5
25 Mr. Sargent asked the Minister for Enterprise and Employment what proportion of the amount recommended by the STIAC report is to go towards post-graduate student support; the number of students involved; the areas of research involved; and the way in which these areas of research were selected. [13648/96]
As the Deputy may be aware, the Minister for Commerce, Science and Technology secured additional funding of £4 million in this year's budget to begin working on the implementation of the recommendations of the Tierney report on Science, Technology and Innovation published last year.
In this regard, the Minister of State with responsibility for Commerce, Science and Technology, Deputy Rabbitte specifically allocated £600,000 to Ph'D's Support. This has resulted in doubling the support rate for 160 PhD students per annum. In addition he introduced a new post-doctoral fellowship scheme. Funding of £200,000 has been provided for ten fellow-ships in 1996. The Minister also established a fund for international collaboration which enables researchers, most of whom are post-graduates, to develop bilateral research contacts for which a sum of £200,000 has been provided.
A further £1.4 million has been allocated to research programmes in the third level sector — viz. the Basic Research, Strategic Research and Applied Research Programmes. These programmes also support research at post-graduate level.
In general, research projects from post-graduate students are in the science and engineering disciplines.
