The ESRI has said this morning that economic growth will be at its lowest level in 17 years in 2008 at about 2.5%.

This is the last nail in the coffin of Celtic Tiger version 1.0.

I know these things are cyclical and so on and the source of the problem will be the fall-off in construction - which was at a level that was too high anyway.

I was getting the dole briefly around 1991, which was the last time when growth was this low and that was a pretty depressing thing to have to do and those days are not welcome back. Hopefully this only represents a re-focusing of the country on the high-tech sector.

We have spent some billions of Euro on scientific research in the past decade. This is not a large amount of GNP or GDP or whatever, but up to now it has focused on developing infrastructure - building buildings, training PhD students, bringing in high-tech equipment, bringing new scientists (mostly Irish, to be honest) into the country, etc.

The next five years will have to focus on ‘translational’ research. That is, research that will have a more direct economic benefit. Up to now, I am not sure how successful you could be, simply because we were not such a high-tech country. Most scientists would not have been involved in large-scale, complex projects because the money to do these kinds of projects was not easy to get. I have seen the ambition and scale of projects increase significantly in the last decade.

UCD built the Conway Institute, which is a world-class facility. TCD have just finished their building, NUIG have the National Centre for BioEngineering Sciences and UCG have several new high-tech buildings. In Maynooth we have a new building also. Each of these buildings are dedicated research spaces. In my days doing a PhD in Galway, there was little dedicated research space - the Martin Ryan building was built in my time and that is indeed a dedicated research space. Most research was done alongside undergraduate teaching and often competed with teaching space for facilities and equipment. Naturally, you can do research in this way, but it is much better to have controlled space in order to get research done.

So, the next five years will tell whether the strategy of investing in research will have worked well. We do pretty well now and have brought things like IBM research into Ireland - IBM do not do research outside of the US, as a rule. Yet, they came to Ireland. We will need more of that as well as more intellectual property (IP) from native sources.

I cannot stand the thought of being back to 1991 levels of growth. Unemployment sucks ass.

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