Industry Funding of Irish Universities

Abstract

This policy paper explores private sector funding of higher education institutions in Ireland. Large corporations are providing financial support to Irish universities in multiple ways including supporting research projects and research centres, establishing professorships in the company name, funding physical infrastructure, and providing scholarships and other supports for students. A lack of publicly available data about the scale and scope of industry funding of Irish universities constrains a comprehensive understanding of how the private sector is engaging with and influencing Irish universities. While industry funding of higher education is often framed as a benefit to Irish society, the risks associated with private sector funding of higher education appear not yet widely considered in the Irish context. International research on industry funding of universities shows that these risks include: (1) an erosion of support for academic endeavours that may not be perceived as having commercial value, (2) corporate capture of the public-good mission of universities to legitimise profit-seeking priorities in policy discourse, and (3) the distraction of academic attention away from social and economic policies that prioritise human health and ecological health. This paper warns of the challenges of preserving the integrity and independence of academia in a higher education landscape increasingly shaped by profit-seeking objectives and market-driven priorities. Policy recommendations include a renewed commitment to strong public investment in universities and greater transparency about the scale and scope of industry funding of higher education in Ireland including a publicly accessible database of all private sector funding. 

Introduction

Ireland’s public education system, including its higher education sector, is widely regarded as a key asset to Irish society. Since the introduction of free secondary school education in 1967 alongside the first proposals for regional technical colleges (McTaggart, 2024), the country has benefited socially and economically from a strong, publicly funded education system (O’Donoghue & Harford, 2016). Since the period of austerity following the 2008 financial crisis, however, public funding for higher education has been severely constrained, and it is widely considered insufficient (DFHERIS, 2022a, 2022b; Holborow and O’Sullivan, 2017; Mercille and Murphy, 2017). Between 2008 and 2019, core public funding for universities decreased by 50% (PBO, 2019), and by 2022, the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (DFHERIS) reported a funding gap of €307 million annually (DFHERIS, 2022a).

In response, the Irish government has introduced key policy reforms to address the funding shortfall. These reforms encourage private sector investment in higher education and create a more commercialised research and teaching landscape.[i] Two recent major reforms – the Technological Universities (TU) Act of 2018 and the Higher Education Authority (HEA) Act of 2022 – have played a significant role in fostering university and industry collaboration. The TU Act facilitated the creation of technological universities (TUs), with the government aiming to foster “deep collaboration between industry and other employers and the Tertiary Education and Skills system through […] shared objectives for applied research and innovation in strategic sectors” (TURN, 2019, p.8). The formation of TUs aligns with the ‘Triple Helix Model’ of research and development, promoting partnerships between the state, industry and academia (Cai and Etzkowitz, 2020; Lerman et al., 2021).

Meanwhile, the HEA act introduced a ‘coregulation’ model of sectoral governance, granting the Higher Education Authority (HEA) greater oversight to align the strategic priorities of higher education institutions (HEIs) with national economic and social objectives. The coregulation model supports the assessment of institutional performance, including key performance indicators (KPIs), such as research income per academic staff and the number of active spin-out companies emerging from institutions (HEA, 2025). The government’s Impact 2030 strategy has also supported these KPIs by aiming to double private sector funding for research from 2018 to 2030 (Government of Ireland, 2022, p. 61). This has led to new policy objectives, such as the introduction of “a new fit-for-purpose, output-based academic contract in technological universities to support […] industry engagement, research output, and commercialisation” (DFHERIS, 2022a, p.11).

Despite this latest wave of market-oriented restructuring, the scale, scope, and influence of private sector funding in Ireland’s higher education system remains underexplored. This paper provides an initial review of the current extent and dynamics of private sector funding based on publicly available data. The paper concludes with policy recommendations aimed to ensure the continued public good mission of Irish universities, including the need for stronger public investment and the creation of a publicly accessible database of private sector funding.

Public information on private funding in Higher Education

The dynamics of public and private funding has been a key focal point in scholarship on Ireland’s higher education sector (Holborow and O’Sullivan, 2017; Lynch et al., 2012; Mercille and Murphy, 2017; Ó Foghlú and Boyle, 2024). A challenge for this research, however, has been bridging the data gap on higher education funding. Accessible, clear and consistent public data is crucial for evidence-based empirical analysis, allowing HEIs, policymakers, and wider society to assess impacts and inform decisions. Reliable data collection fosters greater accountability and transparency in the sector, aligning with principles of academic integrity such as honesty, reliability, and open communication (HEA, 2014; International Center for Academic Integrity, 2021). Moreover, it allows for greater institutional and international comparison.

Currently, multiple public databases and reports outline various aspects of HEI funding in Ireland, including sources like the HEA, Research Ireland[ii], Knowledge Transfer Ireland (KTI)[iii], the EU Financial Transparency System, and the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (DFHERIS). This fragmented network of institutional reporting makes the value and details of non-public funding across and within HEIs in Ireland difficult to accurately assess.

The HEA provides the most consolidated public database, featuring interactive dashboards that visualise key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect HEI ‘System Performance’ (see: HEA, 2025). A key aspect that is monitored is ‘Research, development and innovation’, covering:

• Research student enrolment levels.
• Public and private funding levels of research income.
• The citation impact by HEI.
• The number of active spin-out companies by HEI.
• The number of licences, options and assignments.

Knowledge Transfer Ireland’s (KTI) Annual Technology Transfer Survey (AKTS) is another vital source (see: KTI, 2023), providing dynamic insights on industry-academia partnerships, including:

• Research expenditure by each HEI.
• Research expenditure derived from industry by each HEI.
• Industry collaboration agreements with HEIs (e.g., consultation vs collaboration).
• Industry size partnering with HEIs.

These reports highlight several key issues, such as:

• On average the state provides around 60% of research funding (HEA, 2025).
• Research expenditure is concentrated in urban HEIs (e.g., UCD, UCC, and TCD), where research spending is two to six times higher than in semi-periphery or periphery institutions (e.g., UL, MU, SETU, ATU) (KTI, 2023, p. 40).
• Industry derived funding has accounted for about 7.54% of total research expenditure in traditional universities and 4.62% for TUs (KTI, 2023, p. 40).
• Traditional universities typically engage in research collaboration agreements while TUs more often form consultation agreements (KTI, 2023, p. 13).
• The most common industry partners for HEIs are overseas multinational corporations (MNCs) and Irish small and medium enterprises (SMEs) (KTI, 2023, p. 14).

Other sources include the biennial Higher Education Research and Development survey (Government of Ireland, 2023) and the Impact 2030: Ireland’s Research and Innovation Strategy (Government of Ireland, 2022). These reports, however, do not contain the most current data.

Despite these various reports, a significant portion of information remains publicly inaccessible. Details about the specific industries or organisations that are funding research are often scattered across a patchwork of HEI press releases and media reports. In addition, distinguishing the nature of private sector funding – whether direct research funding or part of broader endowments – is challenging. While some HEIs disclose information on funders in annual reports, reporting remains fragmented and inconsistent. Some industry funding of higher education in Ireland is also considered commercially sensitive, so details are not publicly disclosed. Furthermore, the reported metrics focus primarily on research funding, offering little-to-no insights on private funding for scholarships, equipment, infrastructure, or staffing. Consequently, the overall data landscape remains opaque, making it difficult to determine where, how, and why the private sector is funding HEIs.

To critically understand the issue of this data gap, the next section examines overlooked or underreported examples of private sector funding. This analysis aims to illustrate how limited data transparency can obscure funder practices and motivations that run counter to academia’s public good mission.

Multiple Ways Industry is Funding Higher Education

In this section, we provide a snapshot of the types of investments, which are often overlooked in reporting metrics while paying attention to potential issues that arise from the contradictory practices and motivations of industry partners.

Supporting Research and Funding Research Centres

Between 2007 and 2017, the total research income in the higher education sector in Ireland rose by over 20% in real terms, with a 40% real-terms increase in revenue received from the private sector (HEA, 2019, cited by OECD, 2022). Much of this increase was to support research centres across Ireland; the public funding program to establish research centres requires industry funding. For example, the 2023 Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Research Centres Programme used a cost-share model where SFI provided 40% of the funding with a minimum of 10% and up to 30% of the total centre budget derived from industry, and another 30% coming from non-exchequer, non-commercial sources, including registered charities, the EU, not-for-profit organisations and philanthropy including donations (SFI, 2023). The formation of research centres is intended to drive innovation and competitiveness (Corrigan, 2022; SFI, 2018). The 2025 Programme for Government ( 2025, p. 53) explicitly links the government’s climate action goal with a plan to “expand support for Centres of Excellence on college campuses to foster partnerships between academia and industry, developing new solutions to cut emissions”.

Despite the requirement that publicly funded research centres secure funding from industry, the public research bodies (previously SFI and now Research Ireland) allow industrial funders to choose whether to keep their contributions confidential, as SFI acknowledges:

“SFI is aware that some industry partners do not want the general public to be aware of their involvement with a Research Centre. If this is the case, the industry partner needs to inform the Research Centre that the company should be marked as Confidential, when reporting to SFI” (SFI, 2018, p. 7).

Such funding arrangements, while fostering collaboration, also raise concerns about transparency and the broader impact of corporate involvement. Academic-industry partnerships in research centres are assumed to produce only positive externalities, overlooking potential issues like corporate greenwashing and climate obstruction in academic research. Corporate greenwashing is the industrial practice of highlighting positive environmental actions while concealing or ignoring harmful impacts to create a misleading green image (Bowen and Aragon-Correa, 2014). In contrast, climate obstruction refers to the refusal or failure to act on climate change through various strategies, such as denying the science, delaying policies, or engaging in actions that hinder climate action (Ekberg et al., 2022).

One prominent example of industry funding that has been publicly criticised as greenwashing is Ryanair’s partnership with Trinity College Dublin (TCD), donating €1.5 million to establish the Ryanair Sustainable Aviation Research Centre in April 2021 (and an additional €2.5 million in 2024) to research sustainable aviation fuels, zero carbon propulsion systems, and noise mapping. This move followed Ryanair’s ranking as Europe’s 10^th most polluting company in 2019. Despite broad publicity surrounding this partnership with Trinity College Dublin, Ryanair’s CEO has since publicly discredited sustainable aviation fuels (Goldman, 2024) compounding concerns about the company’s history of greenwashing (Hotten, 2020). The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority reprimanded Ryanair over misleading and insubstantial green environmental claims in its advertisements (Hotten, 2020), and the company has invested heavily in lobbying against environmental regulations in aviation.

The Ryanair-TCD case reflects a broader pattern of fossil fuel-linked investments in Irish universities, raising questions about corporate priorities and the true impact of such funding on sustainability efforts (McGeown & Barry, 2023). While Ryanair’s investment was intentionally very public (see Figure 1), other industry-university partnerships are difficult to ascertain behind the veil covering Ireland’s funding landscape.

Figure 1. Photograph from a May 2024 Trinity College Dublin social media post announcing an additional €2.5 million from Ryanair to continue their support of the Ryanair Sustainable Aviation Research Centre.

Industry Funded Professorships

Another important area of industry funding is the establishment of industry sponsored professorships. In an effort to compensate for a reduction of core academic staff (from 2008 until 2015, core staffing levels in Irish universities reduced by around 12% due to the introduction of the Irish government’s employment control framework; see: HEA, 2017), several HEIs have established new professorships funded by industry. Several of the world’s largest corporations, including Meta and Eli Lilly, have sponsored faculty positions within Irish universities (see: Table 1).

Table 1. Examples of industry-funded professorships in Irish universities.

As more industry funded professorships are announced in Irish universities, public scrutiny of potential conflicts of interest and concern about academic greenwashing have been growing. For example, the new industry-funded CRH Chair of Climate Science at Trinity College, which is sponsored by one of Ireland’s largest carbon polluters, the cement and materials company CRH, has received criticism by students and others (O’Doherty, 2024).

Scholarships Funding

Industry funding for student scholarships, including support for PhD students, is another way that corporations are influencing higher education. Industry sponsorship increases the number of PhD students in some strategic areas of interest that are relevant to the companies.   

Table 2. Examples of prominent industry-funded scholarships and student support in Irish universities.

Figure 2. Photograph posted by DCU in their January 30, 2025 announcement of a new partnership with Deloitte, the professional services company, committing €1 million to DCU to elevate educational opportunities and drive innovation. Deloitte was also the founding partner to the DCU Centre for Climate and Society in 2022.

One prominent organisation offering scholarship funding and sponsorship of PhD students is Allied Irish Banks (AIB), one of Ireland’s largest financial institutions. AIB was recently announced as the ‘philanthropic partner’ supporting Climate Mitigation Research as part of Research Ireland’s Innovate for Ireland 2025 Programme (see Table 2). In 2024, AIB also announced a €10 million investment to establish a new AIB Trinity Climate Hub which aims to “bring researchers together to address challenges around maintaining a stable and liveable climate, securing biodiversity and the ecosystem services provided by nature” (AIB, 2024, p.1). While this funding of climate and environmental research at TCD expands AIB’s public image as a bank that promotes sustainability, AIB’s major shareholders include several multinational companies with a dismal environmental record. According to Davy market research, Blackrock and Massachusetts Financial Services (MFS) own 10.6% and 8.2% of AIB shares, respectively (Sheridan, 2024). Both organisations are among the largest fossil fuel investors and corporate polluters in the world.[iv]^,[v]  

Donations

Another way for industry to influence and support higher education is through direct donations. Big donors to any higher education institution earn access to university leaders; to demonstrate appreciation for their financial contributions, donors are often invited to exclusive events and meetings. For financial accounting, philanthropic donations are often categorised differently to partnerships, research grants, and contracts. As a result, transparent and comprehensive data on donations is difficult to find. A European dataset covering the level and composition of revenue for more than 1,300 HEIs in Europe noted that the level of private third-party funding in HEIs is often underestimated, because donations are usually included under core budgets (ETED, 2019). In Irish HEI financial reports, annual disclosures of research grants and contracts provide an aggregated breakdown by semi-state, state, EU, and industry sources. Donation and endowment disclosures, however, do not reveal the funding sources. This opacity makes it difficult to accurately map and assess which industries and organisations are donating to HEIs and who is gaining access to university decision-makers.

Multiple instances of industry funding in universities seem to be received and classified as donations, such as the Matheson donation to UCC to create a new lectureship and PhD scholarship (UCC, 2023), or Boston Scientific’s multi-annual donations to global healthcare and sustainability research at the UL (University of Limerick, 2022). However, the subtleties of these kinds of donations can be hard-to-pin-down as they are sometimes referred to as donations while on other occasions they are called partnerships. This ambiguity and inconsistency make the funders’ specific roles, and their motivations for providing financial support, difficult to assess.

Discussion: Concerns about Industry Funding of Universities

This review highlights a lack of publicly available data on the scale and scope of industry funding in Irish universities.  To ensure integrity and public trust, disaggregated and transparent data about industry funding in Ireland’s higher education sector is needed. The limited data makes it challenging to understand how extensive and in what ways the private sector is influencing Ireland’s HEIs; there is not formalised, detailed information of the distribution of non-public funding within HEIs across particular institutions, disciplines, and programmes, nor is there data mapped across geographies and gender dimensions. The most comprehensive data available, such as the HEA’s databases and KTI’s Annual Knowledge Transfer Survey, lack granularity on the types of industries, organisations, and type of investment (Table 3). 

Table 3. Publicly available data types on private sector funding in Irish higher education.

To assess and better understand what research areas are being funded by industry and what research areas are not being funded, who is benefitting from industry funding, and who is being excluded, more publicly available data about private sector funding is required. Greater transparency is needed, as is nuance in terms of scope of financial investment and donations across different areas beyond general assessments of research income. Academics, policymakers, and the public would benefit from a more accurate analysis of where exactly private funding is invested into the Irish public higher education system.

Capturing the academic agenda

This review also raises concerns about the risks of corporate interests capturing academia to legitimise their profit-seeking interests. While industry funding may help to address funding gaps in higher education, financial support from corporations often comes with ‘strings attached’ raising ethical concerns (Eaton & Stephens, 2024). The trend toward more industry funding also reinforces a shift in academic priorities toward commercialisation and market-oriented objectives away from non-commercial research and teaching. Industry funding raises questions about potential conflicts of interest in research approaches, design, and dissemination.

One significant issue, charted extensively in international higher education scholarship, is the risk of corporate capture of universities, sometimes referred to as ‘academic capture’ (Lachapelle et al., 2024). This recognises that when corporate interests provide financial support to universities they often influence research and teaching priorities in explicit or implicit ways, potentially steering the university away from its public good mission towards profit-driven aims (Lachapelle et al., 2024). While academic capture has been examined abroad, it has so far received limited attention in Ireland. 

One risk posed by academic capture is that valuable research on social, economic and environmental issues can become sidelined in favour of projects developed for market interests (Gleena et al., 2015). For example, in 2018, the majority of industry-funded research in Ireland focused on Health, Engineering, Technology, and Natural Sciences, amounting to €39.6 million, while the humanities received €400,000 (Government of Ireland, 2021). By 2020, industry funding for humanities was reduced by half to €200,000, while funding for Health, Engineering, Technology and Natural Sciences continued to receive the highest proportions of funding, totalling €39.1 million (Government of Ireland, 2023). This disparity persists despite the recognised importance of humanities research in addressing complex social challenges, such as climate change (Stephens, 2024; van Damme, 2021).

In addition, academic capture can constrain policy responses by biasing public discourse toward industry-favoured policies (Hiltner et al., 2024; Stephens, 2024). Scholarship in this area highlights a wide spectrum of cases where private funders, for example, in the tobacco, fossil fuel, or agri-food industries, have restricted publications or directed funding towards research designed to obfuscate public perceptions, particularly in the context of public health challenges and climate change (Hiltner et al., 2024; Lipton 2015; Bero, 2019). While private sector investment in universities can contribute to excellent research, it is also essential to critically assess the motivations behind corporate funding of higher education. The absence of granular, transparent data on industry funding is thwarting the possibility of critically assessing the potential impacts of private-sector investment in Irish universities.

Conclusions and Policy Recommendations

This review raises some fundamental questions about the future of academic freedom and intellectual autonomy in Irish universities. Several policy recommendations, aimed at the Government, the HEA, and Irish HEIs, also emerge from this analysis.   

1. Core public funding for universities is essential to retain the integrity and public trust of Ireland’s higher education sector to fulfil their public good mission. While industry funding may complement some academic endeavours, this funding should not overshadow the publicly funded research accountable for addressing the needs of people and communities in Ireland. This is particularly important as humanity faces an increasingly turbulent and unstable future ahead.
2. More granular, publicly available data of both public and industry funding in Irish higher education is essential for tracking and monitoring the funding landscape in Ireland. It would also facilitate more critical analysis of public-private collaboration in academic institutions. Currently, data on industry funding of Irish universities is monitored and shared by institutions that promote market-oriented approaches, limiting broader access. We propose that the existing HEA database be expanded to make this information more publicly available, facilitating a more transparent and critical analysis of funding in higher education.
3. Ireland’s research agenda should be co-created and co-designed with diverse actors, organisations and communities beyond industry. More democratic consultative processes are needed to shape the research agenda, including the decision-making processes behind industry sponsorship of academic research institutes, lectureships, and infrastructure to provide more awareness of, and resiliency to, corporate greenwashing and climate obstructionism in Irish universities.
4. Metrics of success within higher education institutions should be revised to deprioritise commercialisation objectives and reprioritise objectives related to meeting the needs of Irish communities. There is also a need to expand qualitative assessments of university research and development as opposed to centring quantitative metrics alone. 
   

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[i] One key point is that these policies also take shape in the context of a wider European project, which includes research and innovation initiatives, such as Horizon Europe or the European Research Area, that aims to ‘pool resources’ among the public and private sector (European Commission: Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, 2024). In addition, EU fiscal rules designed to prevent excessive deficits and debt can also lead to fiscal consolidation, encouraging Member States to attract private investment to support public services.

[ii] Research Ireland is the newly established research and innovation funding agency, consolidating the former bodies of Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council

[iii] Knowledge Transfer Ireland operates out of Enterprise Ireland and from 2024 has been replaced by the KT Boost Programme for a four-year period

[iv] Blackrock is widely recognised as among the most damaging companies in the world because of its environmental record and its funding of fossil fuel exploration and expansion (Posner, 2024). The company’s holdings include $3.7 billion in 3 major tar sands pipeline companies and $75 billion in the 30 biggest producers of tar sands (Cuvelier et al., 2021). It has also been accused by Friends of the Earth US and the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil of investing in companies implicated in the devastation of the Amazon rainforest (Watts, 2024). Blackrock withdrew from Wallstreet’s Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative following the re-election of Donald Trump in 2025 (Kerber, 2025).

[v] MFS investments contradict the objective of the climate research hub. Shareholder advocacy group, As you Sow, reports that MSF hold investments of $170.19 million in fossil fuel companies, $599.51 million in arms and military firms, and $367.68 million in manufacturers and service providers of nuclear armaments and delivery systems (As You Sow, 2024a, 2024b).