The secretary general of a government department is accountable for the actions of thousands of public servants across dozens of functions, agencies, and offices. By definition, the job is challenging. Secretaries general have to work at a very high level, informing line ministers, cabinet and the Taoiseach, and implementing their decisions. Their job is to help solve the problems of the day on behalf of the Irish citizen. There are 16 secretaries general. Only two of them are women. Each has a demanding remit.
The Department of Business, Enterprise, and Innovation (DBEI) has responsibilities across trade, Brexit, jobs, policy around firms from the largest multinationals to the smallest retailer, research, innovation policy, climate change, commercial law, workers’ rights and competition policy, and that list is not exhaustive. The remit is as vast as the set of responsibilities. DBEI is quite different to more traditional line departments like Health and Education, in that it is small in terms of its direct exchequer spend but large when it comes to connecting across the many departments that run the state.
I find this department fascinating.
This is the department that produced the Action Plan for Jobs. It is the author of the FutureJobs strategy. It is part of the Brexit team that has worked on behalf of the State for four years now, and will lead the trade agreement for the State in the coming phase of Brexit as the UK formally leaves the EU on the 31st of this month. Running something like this requires a vast network of experts and dedicated civil servants, about whose work we know practically nothing. We know a lot about the political system. We hear about it daily. We know far less about the system underneath, the body to the government’s brain.
I want to remedy that.
One thing I want to achieve in this series speaking in depth with the secretaries general about their role is to get a sense of their approach to fulfilling those responsibilities, what they see as important, how they think about the jobs they do and the functions they perform, what works, what doesn’t, and where they see the country evolving.
This interview with DBEI’s Secretary General Dr Orlaigh Quinn took place on January 21 in her office in Kildare St. The building DBEI occupies was the first purpose-built government building in the history of the state. Much of the historic building has been refurbished and looks both stately and subdued in a curiously civil-service way. The wood-panelled office of the secretary general is small but functional. The wood of the office is polished Australian jarrah, which looks almost golden in the right light. Double doors join Dr Quinn’s office to the Minister’s. The portico of the office contains an exhibition of women leaders from Ireland’s history, from Countess Markievicz to Máire Geoghegan-Quinn to today’s cabinet members.
In this interview, we will talk about:
- The Future Jobs strategy and how the Government is planning to address Ireland’s productivity gap
- How 11 working groups were needed to pull together Ireland’s climate change strategy
- The far-reaching changes she has seen in the civil service since joining at the lowest grade in the P&T
- Continuing preparations for the “overarching crisis” that is Brexit
- The State’s role in funding science and research to maintain Ireland’s position in a globalised world
- The potential of women remaining untapped in business and her role as a female leader
We begin by trying to understand the scale of DBEI’s activities.
Stephen Kinsella (SK): Dr Orlaigh Quinn, Secretary General of the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation, thank you for taking the time first off. You’re a very, very busy person.
The objective of all of this is to take a look at some of the people who run the State. Many of the people who will be listening to this or reading it will be familiar with the Minister. They will perhaps be familiar with some of the State agencies. They will be far less familiar with the secretary generals who run these gigantic institutions. I’m particularly fascinated by the Department of Business because this is where the micro meets the macro. This is where the large-scale macroeconomic vision of the State gets translated into policies that impact individual firms. One of the things I would like to start with is getting a sense from you of the overview of the Department. Because, of course, it’s not just business is it?
Dr Orlaigh Quinn (OQ): No, it’s a very big department with a very wide remit. I can describe it in four chunks if that would work? I suppose, first of all, we have 16 offices and agencies as part of the Department with about 2,700 staff included across. And if we just take the civil servants within the department, there’s almost 900. But if I tend to think of it by functional area, a lot of people tend to focus on the Department as the enterprise. So, it’s jobs, it’s enterprise, it’s the IDA, it’s Enterprise Ireland. Innovation is a huge feature as well. We have Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and 16 research centres and a whole area of work there.
Then, if I turn to areas like workplace relations, the Labour Court, the WRC, again, a huge block of work, and a huge area of responsibility on the workplace side. Turning to the other side then, the regulatory side, we have everything to do with company law, regulation, health and safety, national standards. All of those pieces that make up the regulatory aspects of business in Ireland.
And then finally, we’re responsible for trade and trade policy. When we talk about Brexit, in particular when we talk about trade negotiations, international developments, anything to do with negotiating at EU level, that all falls within this Department’s remit as well. It’s very wide and very broad. And absolutely, as you say, it goes from very high-level strategic policy if it’s at international level or across the nation, right down to somebody who has a workplace difficulty and might find themselves over in the WRC or in the Labour Court. Or health and safety risk, or all sorts of anything, as I say, that affects somebody in their working life really.
SK: The sheer complexity of what you’re describing… Most people who would listen to this, they might be responsible for a business, they might be responsible for a department within a business. You’re talking about dozens of very, very different aspects.
At what point does something have to be a big enough problem for it to reach your desk?
OQ: That can vary depending on the problem and depending on the individual. I have a management board team. I have seven divisions with seven super people that head up each of those divisions. Things would hit my desk, I suppose, depending on the scale and the impact. Be that on an individual case or, more likely, a sort of a structural problem, or an issue that would affect many. Or if it’s a legislative problem, if we discover something. Could be myriad.
I like to think it’s not just problems at my desk, it’s opportunities and challenges. We do a lot of policy work here. We have a very strong research and development team. A lot of work that we are trying to position as well. And the other thing I’d say as well is – the job we do here, it’s not possible for us to do the job we do without working right across government. Things like education, which is hugely important. Things like justice and areas like foreign affairs. Some of our role is delivering it ourselves, but a lot of it is more soft. Working with others to deliver social protection, again, being a huge part.
SK: When we think about the large government challenges like Brexit or the productivity problem, it’s impossible for it, in some sense, not to land at your door or for you to have at least some observation made on how are we going to deal with Problem X?
OQ: Yeah, very much so.
SK: When a Minister decides something. Cabinet comes with a decision. There is a productivity problem. They say, “Orlaigh, fix it.” What do you do?
OQ: That can tend to be a two-way process. We can advise the Minister that there’s a problem. And obviously, we will do that based on our research-evaluation team and our knowledge of the sectors. And then the Minister would advise government, and we would put forward a range of possible solutions, and government will make a decision. Then it comes back to us to implement that decision. Alternatively, the Minister might say: “I have a particular interest and I see a particular problem,” or “I want to really focus on something like, say regional development.” So, we obviously have to respond to that.
We are advisers. We’re not decision-makers. And so, if a particular area comes in, say regional development, we would obviously then have to look at that in terms of what are the problems? What are the issues? How can we impact? Who do we work with? And so that becomes a collective agenda-setting for us.
It is part of any normal business planning. Actually, even just this morning, and this coming week, we will be doing our business planning for the year. And that effectively takes care of all the known issues. And then obviously, depending on this particular time, if a new government came in with particular priorities… But then we obviously adapt to that. And that can happen, whether it’s a new government or a new minister. Or something happening in the wider world, be it international development or an EU issue. It’s the ability to have the core right and then obviously to be able to facilitate and be agile.
“That was every potential possible action right across governments that could have been done to facilitate a job, any job. There was upwards of 300 actions in the first plan.”
SK: When you think about the core, what is it in your mind that is at the core of making it work?
OQ: I suppose the core really is, and it’s pretty much set out in our strategy, about being the best in terms of employment and everything that underpins that. So, the core is ensuring we have a very strong regulatory structure. That’s really important. But then looking at us positioning Ireland for the future.
So, if you go back to the economic crisis, for example, we had 16 per cent unemployment. Hugely successful here would have been the action plan for jobs. But that was every potential possible action right across governments that could have been done to facilitate a job, any job. There was upwards of 300 actions in the first plan. And then over time that gets whittled down.
Now we’re at full employment, thankfully, and we’re looking at how you position Ireland for the future. That’s a very different mindset and a different policy response. Last year, we launched Future Jobs Ireland with the five key things that we see as essential for the economy. Things like talent, things like innovation, activation. We have really important people outside the workforce that could contribute. Talent and skills and climate change. So, we have five themes that we would say: “Now let’s try and really prioritise what will make Ireland different, if we take actions now, to position us for the future.”
SK: Let’s take two of those five themes. By the way, I am a fan of the Future Jobs strategy and it’s something that I’ve spent a lot of time reading and thinking about. The initial productivity divergence between some firms and other firms, some of that is explained by just simple management techniques. So, we know from the research of people like Nicholas Bloom from Stanford that it’s just management. It’s not processes, it’s just management.
When you think about, let’s say, closing the productivity gap, are you thinking about it in terms of policies to close that management gap or are you thinking more in terms of “we will produce a menu and then people will sample from the menu” as suits them?
OQ: I think we’d certainly be producing things that we think are essential. And obviously you mentioned management. If you look at productivity, we have the highest productivity internationally. You break it down and what you’ll find is that the multinational sector are streets ahead and our indigenous sector actually has fallen even in recent years. That’s a very serious concern. One of the things we did – and I’m a great believer in research and evaluation and underpinning of evidence – we brought in the OECD. And they did quite a significant study for us, in particular, focusing on other countries as well and best practice. Arising from that, there’s a whole block of work going on now to say: “Okay, they gave us lots of ideas, now what will we do ourselves?”
Some of that is management. Some of that is very small family farms. Some of it we’ve already done. Like online. A lot of the smaller companies are not into online sales. So, we’ve brought in the retail voucher for internet sales to support one on one.
We would obviously use Enterprise Ireland, but in particular as well the Local Enterprise Offices. So, there would be a whole structure put in place then. We will publish that strategy in the next couple of months, we’ll be finished it. That will put in place where we would identify… Well, we know what the problem is in many ways. But really put in place structures to meet those challenges.
SK: The second theme that matters hugely, particularly in the current moment but also in the next few years, is climate change. We know that it’s going to require enormous resources, not just from the state, but from households, firms, and across the spectrum really to deal with it.
Climate change initiatives in Ireland have been critiqued. But what is interesting about that critique is they’re typically critics of ambition. They’re typically saying: “Look, it’s not big enough. It’s not fast enough. It’s not far enough.”
Again, that’s not your decision, if you like, to make. But, when you think about implementing those kinds of targets, do you think about it in terms of directly implementing it or does it go through those local representatives? Or is it much more in dialogue with different agencies?
OQ: I think it will very much vary and it’ll vary by sector as well. For example, our big companies, pretty much a lot of them would be self-sustaining in terms of renewable energies. Or else they’re trading across at EU level. But for the smaller companies who will struggle, some of the discussions we would have are: do you penalise companies or do you help them and support them?
SK: Of course.
OQ: And these are really tricky questions and ideally you help and support to get them into the best area, but there are costs involved. We have to recognise, from a business perspective, it’s one of those cross-government approaches where people will bring different perspectives. We would bring sort of the business perspective, saying there is a cost imposed here so how can we support somebody to make the changes that they need to be able to change? So it’s not and it never is one overall solution. It will depend very much on the sector, the size, the impact. Again we would have a huge involvement here with the food sector, the food industry. So there is a direct link again into agriculture and obviously Agriculture have a whole range of responses as well, so we need to work with them from the food sector, from the industry side, and feed in responses.
So you just make sure you’re on top of your brief, you know what you’re saying and you have your facts and figures and, and you argue your case, and you have to be able to do that too.
Dr Orlaigh Quinn
SK: How do you ensure that it’s all joined up? Because you’ve got Agriculture doing their climate change thing, obviously you have an entire department that literally is the Climate Change Department, and then you guys are coming in and, presumably, the Taoiseach’s office has something to say and Finance wants to say something else…
OQ: Yes.
SK: How do you knit those together? Is it is a seminar, is it a food fight – how does it work?
OQ: It’s a variety. First and foremost it’s whatever is in the programme for government, so that sets the overall approach. Secondly, depending on the sector – and it tends to be like climate, or jobs is another one, where there are those cross-cutting areas – quite frequently you’ll have a cabinet committee that the Taoiseach would chair, that I would attend, and another departments would attend. You’d have different officials feeding into that. I would be going in to report on what’s happening on the industry side or the enterprise side, but I’m listening to what’s happening across the board and the Taoiseach and the relevant ministers are at the table and so that tends to deliver consensus.
The Department of the Taoiseach is hugely important in those cross-coordinating mechanisms because, again, they bring people together. Then if there’s particular areas here that are of interest to me or to this Department, I’ll ask colleagues to join a working group. Could you come in and we just deal specifically with this one? As part of the development of the national climate strategy from example, there were 11 working groups across government and I think we were on five of them.
SK: Eleven? Wow!
OQ: Then that all channels, obviously under Richard Bruton, the minister, into the cabinet committee.
SK: What does that feel like? You’re sitting there, you’re briefing the Taoiseach. How does that feel like?
OQ: That’s the job, I suppose. What does it feel like? That’s what I do every day, that’s part of the role, I suppose I’ve come up the ranks I’ve trained, I would have briefed Taoisigh when I was principal officer in other areas of where I work. So you just make sure you’re on top of your brief, you know what you’re saying and you have your facts and figures and, and you argue your case, and you have to be able to do that too.
SK: Good. In terms of your experience throughout the civil service, how do you feel it’s changed?
OQ: Oh God, it’s changed enormously. When I started, I started as a clerical assistant, that grade is now gone. That was really the most junior possible in the P&T at the time, and it was very hierarchical. Now, some people would say, it still is to some extent, but nothing compared to what this was. And this was also very structured functionally. And again, we can say we still are, but we’re much more across government now, much more connected. And people tend to think of the civil service as all the same. But it actually isn’t. Because every department I’ve worked in has a different culture, different approaches, different business. It’s a huge business, the business of government.
I would say now, and certainly in my previous role, where I was head of reform for the civil service, we did a lot more in terms of collective actions. We set up, for example, the Civil Service Management Board, which all secretaries general sit on. Before, we didn’t have such a structure. And we very much focused on what we called the one civil service and brought through a huge number of things that actually impacted on us all, things like project management, mobility, a lot of HR and practices.
So I would say now that we’re far more mobile across the civil service, far more mobile outside the civil service and in, so even people coming into this Department, there’s a much greater diversity of experience, which is great. I would say probably we have structured ourselves more in terms of – you will see far more specialists where before it would have been very much generalists. So we have now specialists on our economic evaluation side, specialists in our HR, very strong specialists on our company law side. So people are probably more – there’s more diversity of roles.
SK: Good. Do you see that continuing to evolve?
OQ: I think it will, because it’s the nature of our business of government. I think it’s becoming more complex, more specialised. And it’s, it’s just, I think, a feature of modern life. In my career, for example, I was the IT manager, I was a systems analyst in CSO, I was the first IT manager in the Department of Arts with Michael D. Higgins, then I moved across into policy. And it’s wonderful because you have fantastic career opportunities. I don’t know now, would that be as easy to do, because we’re specializing more. And so now people tend to look at your experience and your skill set, whereas I could go into a department and say: “I really want to work in X.” And again, that’s always depending on who you’re dealing with. But I think it’s that specialist/generalist, and trying to get that balance right, to give people opportunities to do other things if they wish, and for that for the organisation to benefit. So I’m fully in favour of it, but at the same time, we really need very strong specialist skills now.
“It’s an overarching crisis that has taken up an enormous amount of our time, an enormous amount of our resources.”
Dr Orlaigh Quinn on Brexit
SK: Increasing specialisation implies an increase in complexity. Or maybe one hand really washes the other, it’s more complex, so you need more specialists. As an economist, obviously I’m hugely in favour of more economists everywhere – sprinkle us around. But one thing that I’m struck by is the management challenge of that.
In a world of generalists where the problems are relatively general and the departments relatively siloed, it seems like a command and control model of management would pretty much work to do that, particularly if it’s that hierarchical military kind of structure. In a world where you’ve got massively complex, overlapping at many levels, many specialisms of which you are obviously not a specialist in all of the things, how do you think about managing that? I think you’ve seven assistant secretaries reporting into you. Do you locate the level of specialist expertise there, or how do you think about that challenge? Because it seems like it’s only going to go one way.
OQ: The seven assistant secretaries would all be very senior managers, so they’re managers more so than specialists at that level. And it’s not to say that some of them aren’t specialists in their own right. And I’m thinking in particular of the areas of company law and company regulation, because over time, we’ve just built so much expertise in that area. The others could be specialists in terms of as you say, economics, but it’s broader. And they layer on the management side.
I think it’s being open to having the specialists but recognising the broader areas. And the one thing I would say about this Department, and I mentioned earlier about working across government, we work so, so strongly as well outside with the business community. For example, we have nine regional enterprise boards, but all of them are chaired by a business person in the community. So it’s very much bottom-up. And it’s to make sure that we can avail of all the skills and all of the talents, that it’s not located in this Department, because it’s not only, can’t be and it never will be. But it is to make sure that we get the best of advice and the best of experience.
In a way, it’s probably being open to a lot more skills. And I think that’s a major change where, in the olden, olden days, the civil service people sat in their office and wrote a strategy. Now, you just wouldn’t dream of doing that without being out either nationally, or internationally as well.
SK: One of the tasks that this department has had to grapple with is Brexit. And that’s a bit like – I’m going to call it the jobs crisis, but it was an everything crisis in 2007-2008. Brexit is itself almost an everything crisis as well in the sense that if the worst possible outcome came to be, it would cause tremendous hardship to exactly the people who you serve. When Brexit happened, one of the things that was remarkable was the moment when the then Taoiseach Enda Kenny stood up, I think it was the day after Brexit actually, and he essentially produced a giant table of things that the Irish government was going to do.
It was remarkable in terms of its contrast between the British system, which was then in the process of imploding, both politically and technically, and the Irish system. To hear you had the leader of the most exposed, most vulnerable country coming up and saying here’s a plan – obviously, there’d been detailed Brexit planning before that happened, but since then, how has your department been working, obviously as part of the team, to deliver a good outcome for the citizens in terms of Brexit?
OQ: Brexit has been all-encompassing, I would say, across all of our business areas, because every business area is affected, whether it’s national standards, whether it’s health and safety, whether it’s chemicals – you name it, there’s a Brexit impact. I was very sad, I have to say, when when the decision came through, because I had actually worked in the Commission myself for three years, and I’d had a lot of colleagues that had worked with me at that time on structural funds that are working in the UK. So I was on a personal basis.
I also think it’s a huge loss to us because we share so many common agendas with the UK in terms of areas like services development and the business community and the way we think, so from a business perspective, it was bad. It’s an overarching crisis that has taken up an enormous amount of our time, an enormous amount of our resources, be it staffing or be it costs.
“When I meet my counterpart in the UK, for example, and head of the business ministry in the UK, they have 1,400 people in their ministry working on Brexit.”
One of the things we did here in particular was a very strong focus on the impacts and the research. So we would have brought in Copenhagen economics, we did a major study because we have the trade mandate here in particular, did an analysis of the four options at that time, which would have included be it a free trade agreement, a crash out, a Canada-type deal, and again, that showed just the impact that we would be down upwards of 7 per cent of GDP. Not a loss, but still less than it should have been at.
So just more recently, we repeated the study looking at it now the new agreement is in place, and we only published that I think, last week or the week before. The impact has halved. It’s down to 3.2-3.9 per cent in terms of the impact. But it is still an impact. We’re actually at a competitive disadvantage vis a vis the other member states at EU level because they have moved on and they’re not impacted to the extent that we are. They have more headspace and more capacity for innovative thinking, but we’re still grappling with Brexit. And when I meet my counterpart in the UK, for example, and head of the business ministry in the UK, they have 1,400 people in their ministry working on Brexit. I don’t know what they’re all doing, but he has 1,400.
I don’t think there’s a single area of this department that hasn’t a Brexit impact. To manage it, we put in place a Brexit team, which comes in under our assistant secretary who heads up trade more generally, because we will now be in the trade negotiation space as part of the next step. I found out things that I never found out before. Agriculture, for example, had a funny one about animals, because you won’t be able to import animal pets. The three pets are cats, dogs, and ferrets. Why would you think ferrets? Is that’s the underpinning directive is — I think it might be rabies, but I’m not sure? All sorts of odd things come out of the woodwork when you start really digging. So I have learned lots of things that I didn’t ever think I’d need to know in my career.
SK: I think there’s a really, really important point there which is Brexit has forced us to really think about the microstructure of the economy in a way that we didn’t really before. We assumed it was urban-rural, Dublin versus everywhere else. It’s actually forced us to think about where all the piggeries that will be impacted if this type of canned good gets a 19 per cent tariff put on it. It’s really forced us to think in those terms.
OQ: Absolutely. So what we did really for the business community, in particular, was we put in place what we call the “no-regret” policy. We ask businesses to think about doing the things that they should be doing anyway. And that would have no regrets if Brexit happened or didn’t happen. So things like diversifying your markets. Becoming more productive. Being more competitive. And then we make sure in the trade negotiations that we would deliver the best trade deal we could.
Actually, we’ve seen quite a lot of companies now moving in that direction. So even though we’re still hugely embedded with business in the UK, it has dropped. We’ve seen a big uptake particularly on the EU side, and we run trade missions all the time, bringing companies into other markets, and we have increased them very substantially. A lot of companies are doing new business, which is really positive as well. So there are positives. But we know it will always be negative for us as well.
SK: That’s true. In terms of the trade negotiations that are going to take place, obviously there’s the EU level, how do you think about feeding into them?
OQ: We are part of a number of EU committees. You have the trade Council, and that would be the main one, the UK will be slightly different than others because it has a broader remit. So there’s things like fisheries security, foreign affairs, that wouldn’t normally be part of a trade agreement. Hence, we will maintain the current arrangements that we had dealing with Brexit where they’re led by the Department of the Taoiseach, Foreign Affairs, and then ourselves and others obviously have a huge role as well.
It will be slightly different, where in the normal course of events, when the member states agree to enter discussions, the file is pretty much handed over to us. And then we go in as Ireland negotiating with the EU member states. So the likes of MERCOSUR, for example, or CETA, or any of those would have been much more this department, obviously looking to colleagues across government, but we would have led. We will still lead but it’s just it’ll be different for Brexit because of the scale and because of the importance of the UK relationship.
SK: When I think about Ireland, as a small open economy, I think about globalisation. I think we’ve done incredibly well out of the increased interconnection of markets. I look at what’s happening in the world. And I have a worry that the form of globalisation that Ireland has enjoyed from, let’s say, 1958 until around about now is tending to sputter. Right?
It was trade-based globalisation up until maybe 1995. And then it was financial globalisation until kind of the 2007/08 crisis. Then it’s been, let’s recover from that. And recovery hasn’t come. So if you look at trade volume to the trade flows or financial flows, they’re not back to where they should be if the increased integration was happening.
OQ: But if you look at it from the employment side, we’re up like 6 per cent this year on FDI in jobs coming into the country. We’ve had quite a substantial increase on that side. We’re in a funny place at the moment on trade because of, I think, certainly the relationship with the US and the UK.
So it’s a bit like we’re in the middle of two major upset partners. But Ireland, I think, couldn’t possibly survive being the small open economy that we are without global trade. And I think that’s where we have to position ourselves. One of the things I would say to you we’re seeing a lot of growth in is on the science and innovation side. Certainly when I would do a trade mission, or if I’m over in the States, a lot of people would say they come to Ireland for various reasons, but they tend to stay for the openness and the global and the talent. And so, for us, it’s about responding to that.
In the last budget, and over the next couple of years, we’re funding at the moment about 1,400 PhDs through the Science Foundation Ireland research centres. So we’re now going to fund another 700 PhD students and we’ve a €100 million budget for that. That’s growing our talent in specific areas like IT, like AI where we are really focusing. And we see a lot of that — we have more research partnerships now with Germany than we do with the UK. Yeah, we have.
I was over in the US in December leading actually our first research mission abroad, we brought six of our research centres. And we spent five days in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Again, that’s building partnerships. We’ve 450 partnerships with the US on research, 200 plus with companies involved as well, not just academic, but very much business-focused. And so for us, it’s about building that expertise, building the clustering. I think it’s the ADAPT Centre in Trinity would say to me, they have a network of AI and machine learning specialists. And when they meet, they have about 1,000 that are on their books. So that’s the skill base that we have now in the country. And we’re way above our EU partners in terms of that.
“Croke Park is a testbed for a number of the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) research centres. And it’s fascinating what they’re doing there because they’re tracking the light, what grass they need to water and whatnot, depending on the light.”
Dr Orlaigh Quinn on science and innovation
SK: The challenges that have been put to me around Science Foundation Ireland that it doesn’t fund basic research, it’s just applied, which annoys my basic research colleagues, obviously. But there is that question about how much are we investing into those areas, which are ultimately foundational. The second is that as a percentage of GDP, we are far below our EU colleagues in terms of the amount that we spend.
One of the things we know is we’re going to become a knowledge economy where we basically trade intangible capital, more or less, that’s what we’re all going to be doing. And we have a huge pool of highly qualified people now come to third level and also further education. How do you think about those two things? So you’ve got this sort of gap in basic science that we just don’t fulfil, or we do but not to this level. And then we’ve got this other part which is at a certain point, it just needs to get bigger.
OQ: Two things. Certainly SFI would totally disagree with you that they’re not funding basic research, because they would say it’s about 60/40 in terms of what’s going into the research centres, because remember, all of the research centres have students as part of their research efforts. So they would certainly disagree with you on that.
You also have to look at the mandate of SFI. And the mandate is to deliver research close to industry. And so they are doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do. Sure. And they’re doing it very well, I would say. And punching way above their weight. And we’re not funding to the extent that the commitment that we made in our strategy, which was two and a half per cent of GDP. Depending on the measures, if you use GNI* we’re at about 1.9. But certainly, you have to look at as well, if you come from where we came from, the budget has increased very substantially in recent years, could we do more? Absolutely.
Our impacts are much higher. I was only looking at data last week actually on some of the global citing scores. Of the 10 countries in the EU spending more than us, we’re actually scoring much higher than them. So what we’re doing is much more impactful. I think we’ve the highest range of cited research in the world. And we’ve a huge number of star performers. Actually, it’s one of the benefits of Brexit that we have seen some really star performers in research wanting to relocate to Ireland, because they don’t feel comfortable in the UK or they’re not comfortable in the US. Some of the recent appointments have come from that. And we’re getting partnerships with Cambridge and partnerships with Oxford.
The other positive that’s really important about the SFI research centres, and I don’t think there’s a country in the world that’s doing it, is that none of them are located in only one university. It’s the collective of the talent. Of the 16, we brought six with us to the US on the recent trade mission. What was really exciting was the impact of them working closely together. So for example, you’d have robotics working with analytics. One of the very basics – it’s not basic because it’ll work – but you know, sensors in drains so that the city council no longer has to check every drain to see is it blocked. They can immediately know from the science and the research that the guys are doing, which ones they have to look at.
Croke Park is a testbed for a number of the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) research centres. And it’s fascinating what they’re doing there because they’re tracking the light, what grass they need to water and whatnot, depending on the light. They’re tracking the crowds and how they enter the stadium. So for example, next year when the football finals are on, they know exactly what way they come so if there are competing teams and there might be aggression, they can corral them on different routes.
So it’s a testbed for a whole range of areas and some of the technology that they’re testing there, American companies have brought from stadiums in the States. Again, it’s that sense of testbed, implementation, and then possible business value. And certainly, I learned a huge amount when I was leading the research mission of just the sheer applicability of what they’re doing and how this can add to Ireland Inc, in terms of quality of life, but Ireland Inc, wherever we want to be positioning ourselves, as a global innovation leader.
SK: When you think of the State, and here I’m thinking of the work of Mariana Mazzucato, and people like that, The Entrepreneurial State – the State as the thing that invests in the research and the kind of good ideas going forward, like you’ve just given me a kind of a perfect example of that. What do you see in the next few years in terms of the Department as it rolls out its various strategies?
I’ve always been concerned that the State doesn’t get the credit for a large amount of what it does drive along the road. You hit a pothole, the rest of the road is perfect, you come in the door and you say the pothole, you know, and a lot of the time we’re talking about the potholes, and we’re not talking about the road that got us there. How do you think about, first off, that entrepreneurial state idea, as expressed through SFI? It can be expressed in many areas simultaneously, but also, that notion of the taxpayer or the citizen, perhaps, understanding that it is the State that’s providing all of this stuff?
OQ: Harry Truman, I think, said what I often think: “If you don’t need to claim the credit for something, you actually get more things done,” because people have worked together and they’re not all wondering about who’s going to claim the fame. Certainly, I think as a civil servant, we would be very much in that area.
But I would be very keen for this Department, because we’re the Department of Innovation as well, that we have an innovative workforce within the Department. And certainly one of the things we did the last couple of years – political priorities as well – we brought in the Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund. That was a new initiative and a new fund of €500 million, where we went out on a competitive basis and on a scale.
We didn’t want small projects, we wanted big projects that would make a difference. So applications had to be a million-plus. We wanted collaborations, so you had to have at least one SME company with you. We changed the rules on the second call to have two because it was so successful. And we did it in the space of about three months and I remember thinking: “Oh Lord, is this going to work at all?” We had done the press release. We had done the grand announcements. Will we get any ideas?
We got 300 applications, 300 separate ideas, which is amazing. And we were only able to fund 28 in the first round in terms of the funding that we had. So it just shows, actually, that there’s a there’s huge potential and creativity in the country.
SK: So you reject somewhere on the order of 90 per cent of the applications. Presumably, you took the top 10 per cent. They got funded and congrats to them.
The ones that weren’t funded, you know, the 10 to 20, presumably at a certain point – this is the big problem when you’re deciding to allocate funding and I’ve had this problem myself quite recently – if you doubled the amount, you could easily see the next 20 per cent finding their way. So it’s a loss of potential.
OQ: I know. So what we try to do, first of all, and it’s really important for a small country like Ireland; all of the assessment was done by international panels. That was one that we really wanted. Some of the applications simply weren’t ready. And that’s fine too. But what we did was we tried to make sure that all of the other applicants had an interview, a visit, a potential with other schemes, say run out of Enterprise Ireland, or the local enterprise offices, to try and pick up: “Could we do something there?”
SK: Excellent.
“We’re not diverse enough in the civil service in terms of the populations that we serve.”
Dr. Orlaigh Quinn
OQ: And that is rolling out. So even of the second set, when we launched the second call for the Disruptive Technologies Fund, we’re now at 43 projects. And again, really focusing on whether could they fit into somewhere else. I’m always surprised there are so many potential supports that we can give.
We launched the loan fund, again kind of out of Brexit, but really trying to look at companies to restructure as well. So they may fit into a different scheme. It’s really important to try and harness that, that we don’t lose that. We won’t get it all. We’re now actually in the really positive stage, even with SFI, that we have more ideas than we can fund. But that’s all for another budget and another potential funding round. As somebody said, it’s a lot better than having money and no ideas.
SK: That’s a very good point. When I think about the constraints that some of the sectors in the economy are under, it is really interesting to know that the constraints are there, but they might be economic and might be political, but where the funding allows, actually the ideas are there to meet those challenges, which is really interesting.
OQ: Yes. And very much going back to your earlier comment with the smaller enterprises, a particular focus we have is on women and managers and entrepreneurs and on women as entrepreneurs, because what we tend to find in particular with women is that they don’t scale up. They get to a certain level. And then they’ll say: “I’m okay, now.” Whereas we really want to grow some of the fantastic ideas that they have. Enterprise Ireland just recently launched a specific programme for women entrepreneurs, and again, it’s to try and harness that wonderful work and creativity.
SK: It’s something that I’ve always been struck by, the need to integrate that side of the economy. It’s just taking a longer time than we would have liked it to, I think. What struck me actually is how passionate you are for that particular project. It’s great to see that coming through because it’s going to change lots and lots of people’s trajectories.
OQ: I speak to a lot of women’s groups, women entrepreneurs particularly, small entrepreneurs, but it fits into other areas, they’re all connected. It fits into other priorities that we have like remote working, or flexible working. And it also fits into very much, I suppose, as a senior a woman leader, to make sure that women do become the leaders, and do get involved and do progress. So it kind of hits a lot of the areas that I’m interested in, not just on the business side, but more in terms of senior women as managers.
SK: It’s a really important thing. Much of the research that’s done, particularly on Fortune 500 companies, shows that when we have a majority of women serving on boards, the returns are actually higher, which is, which is really interesting.
OQ: Absolutely. I’m very fortunate here, my board is 50:50. So that’s really excellent. But I’ve sat on other boards, or certainly know of other boards that have no women or one or two women. So I’m part of the group, set up by the Taoiseach, on balance for better boards. If I look across my own cohort, there are only two female secretaries general out of the group of 16. And I’m only the eighth since the foundation at the State.
SK: So we’ve got a way to go.
OQ: We have a long way to go, you know. We’ve made huge progress. But it’s just to get people right up to the top. That’s really important.
SK: Is there one or two specific things that could change?
OQ: For women in particular? I think sometimes it’s that expression, you know, unless you see it, you can’t be it. We ran a conference in November to celebrate Countess Markievicz, the first minister for Labour, but it was 60 years before we had another female minister after Countess Markievicz, which was Maire Geoghegan Quinn, who’s now on our Science Foundation Ireland board, which is great. But we brought in a lot of schoolchildren. And we brought in a lot of young businesswomen leaders as well.
As part of that, I didn’t want to just do a conference and “that’s it and we’re done”. Part of it is, we’re funding now a bursary for PhD students in Women in Leadership, again, just to bring learning back in. So I probably concentrate on the confidence piece, the network piece, but a lot of it is not for women. It’s for men who are equally involved, and to make sure that people recognise that diversity.
It’s actually to have it in the round. People talk about women and diversity, women are not diversity, because women are 50 per cent of the population and 50 per cent of the talent pool, so actually, if you want the best talent, you have to look across the board. But after that then, we’ll have to start looking because we’re not diverse enough in the civil service in terms of the populations that we serve. And I think that’s another challenge that we are working on, but we need to do more.
SK: I had reservations about our ability to cover Brexit, globalisation, governance, women in business, and the work of the Department. And we’ve actually managed to do it all. I’m, I’m just really thankful that you’ve taken the time to do this. It’s been fantastic. Is there anything we didn’t cover that you feel like we should?
OQ: Gosh we could be here for another three hours.
SK: Because I could listen all day. I’m good, but you have other places to be.
OQ: We covered a huge amount. I think for me, it’s that ability for people to work across agendas and the ability to be agile and flexible and move. That’s really important for us in the civil service, it’s really important for us to have that understanding of the political process and the way in which we serve the political system. And ultimately the way we serve the public, because that’s what we are, public servants. And I think that’s one I would stress.
This job as we’ve talked it through is hugely interesting. Every day is a different day. For me, look, it’s an honour. It is an honour to be a secretary general. It’s an honour to be secretary general of a department that has so much potential impact for people. And I think that’s what’s important. And it’s to do that to the best I can. But there are lots of other areas we could talk about.
SK: I think we’ll leave it there. Dr Orlaigh Quinn, thank you so much.