Ryanair’s CEO, Michael O’Leary, has publicly discredited sustainable aviation fuels, calling them a “wheeze”. And yet, Ryanair has donated €4m to Trinity College’s Ryanair Sustainable Aviation Research Centre.
In 2016 Trinity College announced that it would divest from fossil-fuel related investments. But, in 2020, it accepted a donation from Cement Roadstone Holdings (CRH) to sponsor a new professorial chair of climate science at a cost of €1.7 million over a 10-year period. CRH emitted 46.5 million tonnes of carbon in 2022, more than the combined emissions of the 59 lowest carbon-emitting countries in the world.
At UCC, Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has sponsored an industrial chair of semiconductor technologies at the Tyndall National Institute and the School of Chemistry.
These are not anomalies. Rather, according to new PublicPolicy.ie research into funding of Irish universities by researchers at Maynooth University, it is increasingly becoming the norm – and Government policy is clear that the influence of corporates and the private sector is set to grow.
Indeed, the establishment of technological universities and the Higher Education Act 2022 both play a role in increasing third-level and industry collaboration – especially in science and technology which, in 2022, secured 99 per cent of all industry funding, compared to just one per cent for humanities.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, State investment in higher education plummeted, with core public funding decreasing by 50 per cent between 2008 and 2019. In 2022, the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (DFHERIS) reported a €307m annual funding gap.
The PublicPolicy paper is authored by Jennie Stephens, professor of climate justice at the Icarus Climate Research Centre in Maynooth University; Dr Conchúr Ó Maonaigh, postdoctoral fellow with Maynooth’s department of geography; and Laurie Reilly, a research assistant at the geography department.
“International research on industry funding of universities shows that these are several risks,” they write.
“It can lead to an erosion of support for academic endeavours that may not be perceived as having commercial value.
“It can also distract academic attention away from social and economic policies that prioritise human health and ecological health.
“And there is a challenge in preserving the integrity and independence of academia in a higher education landscape increasingly driven by profit-seeking objectives and market-driven priorities.”
Speaking to The Irish Times, the three researchers say there is a significant lack of transparency about the scale and scope of industry funding of higher education.
Stephens spent some time working in US academia before returning to Ireland, where she studied the influence of the private sector in higher education – and where it has long been recognised that investment in academia buys power and influence.
“Fossil fuels, plastics, technology, chemical and agrichemicals invest strategically in higher education,” Stephens says.
“We know that they are not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They are strategically investing because they think that investment in universities will help profits, whether through improving their reputation or being able to influence policy, because universities play a big part in setting the discourse for policy options.
“Because the public system is strong, but chronically underfunded, there is more pressure to get money from other sources.”
The source of funding does not necessarily speak to the quality of academic work, says Stephens, and lots of good work can come from industry-funded research.
“But at the agenda-setting level, especially with fossil fuels, it means that companies might fund fossil-fuel friendly technical fixes, such as carbon capture, but not fund science on how to phase out fossil fuels. This is one of the biggest risks.”
Stephens says she has withdrawn from two public-sector research proposals because they included polluting industries as partners.
Dr Lisa Keating, director of research and innovation with the Irish Universities Association, says there are safeguards around private research funding to third-level.
“They are subject to rigorous due diligence processes to assess ethical, reputation and strategic considerations before acceptance,” she says.
“When it comes to collaborative research projects, similar safeguards are in place to maintain academic independence and research integrity. These include clear contractual frameworks, conflict of interests declarations [which] help to mitigate risks related to biased research agendas or compromised academic freedom, oversight and review committees and performance and compliance monitoring.”
Keating says universities do not approach industry funding for research as a money-saving exercise.
“In our public universities, industry funding is seen as complementary to State or other funding, such as that from the EU. Many major research programmes have multiple funding sources.”
She says, however, that industry funding cannot fund the sector alone.
“It can support national innovation goals and relieve some burden on the public sector, [but] it cannot replace the foundational role of strong, sustained government investment in research and development – investment that enables research for public good, supports a diverse knowledge base and ensures Ireland’s global competitiveness in the long-run,” Keating says.
“We have called on the Government to undertake a major research investment programme.”
A spokesperson for Trinity endorsed the comments made by the IUA and added that Trinity worked with industry “because it wants to make things better”.
Ó Maonaigh accepts industry funding can have public value, but says there is a pressing need for more transparency about who is funding what – and why.
Industrial funders are allowed to choose whether to keep their contributions confidential, while “commercial sensitivity” means access to information can be routinely denied to both researchers, journalists and the wider public.
“It isn’t always possible to know the information that we want,” says Ó Maonaigh. “But we’re not looking for the intellectual property of technologies, but simply what is the scale of investment going into certain departments. There is information held in a remote server at the Department of Enterprise, but it is difficult for the public or the academic community to measure it,” he says.
Reilly struggled to gather comprehensive data for the paper, because the data itself is scant.
“It’s so fragmented, even within government departments, so policymakers themselves don’t have an accurate picture and map of industry funding,” she says.
“While DFHERIS [the Department of Higher Education] releases some reporting on funding, it is limited.”
With a requirement that publicly funded research centres secure funding from industry, Ó Maonaigh – himself an early-career academic – points out that younger researchers can be particularly vulnerable to corporate pressure.
“Early career academics are struggling with precarious work and lack of funding, so if an organisation comes along offering a salary, it’s hard to say no. Perhaps there may be more freedom when someone is more advanced in their career,” he says.
In response, Keating says all IUA member universities openly report their research projects.
“At any one time, there are a myriad of research projects at various stages of operation. If you look at, for instance, the University of Galway’s Combustion Chemistry Centre, you will see the details of the project, including the commercial partners involved in supporting it.”
This, Keating says, helps safeguard academic independence and ensure oversight when companies such as CRH fund research activities.
Stephens says, however, that private industry funding can constrain academics and research centres by ensuring that only companies with enough wealth get to dictate the agenda in the first place.
“Geothermal energy, for instance, has so much potential, but it doesn’t have a powerful lobby group, so it is under-recognised and underinvested. And how secure will academics feel to critique their key or future funders? These are the longer-term consequences that we need to consider.”
Higher education funding and the private sector: in numbers
€307m – the annual funding gap facing Irish higher education
€39m – industry-funded research into health, engineering, technology and natural sciences in 2020
€200,000 – industry-funded investment into the humanities in the same year
