Seán Ó Foghlú and Professor Mark Boyle are working together in relation to research for policy – seeking to enhance the impact of research in Maynooth University on public policy and looking at how to support such activities across the Irish higher education system.
Seán Ó Foghlú and Mark Boyle convened a series of eight open discussion meetings which were organised on a cross-disciplinary basis (April to June 2023) to secure a better understanding, from the perspective of Maynooth University staff, of what Maynooth University might do next to help researchers unlock the full value of their work for public policy. Following this, they drafted a discussion paper to put some shape on and to place on the record the views which colleagues articulated during these meetings. This record was tested and further considered in two briefing and refinement meetings with the original participants and other interested colleagues, which took place September and October 2023. Following these meetings, they published an updated version of this paper in March 2024:
In February 2024, they published a paper on how universities can organise themselves to unlock research for policy. While there is a lot of discussion underway about what either policy-makersor researchers should do, there has not been the same discussion about how higher education institutions should organise themselves internally and collectively to do so. This paper aims to set this emerging discussion in context and to support its continuation with a view to assistinghigher education institutions in realising their potential for input into policy-making. The paper is available here:
Seán Ó Foghlú and Mark Boyle worked with Dublin’s North East Inner City Initiative in organising a Roundtable in May 2024 in the Department of an Taoiseach. The Roundtable arose from a desire for a fresh perspective on drug dealing and on-street drug taking, expressed by those from the North Inner City Community Coalition for the development of a new strategy for the North East Inner City (NEIC). The NEIC secretariat identified and explored the possibility of an engagement involving a number of key stakeholders in a roundtable discussion, including policy-makers, those involved in the delivery of public services, the local community and academics/researchers from Maynooth University. The Roundtable report and the NEIC Strategic Plan that it fed into are available here: https://www.neic.ie/publications.
Seán Ó Foghlú and Professor Mark Boyle are organising a series of seminars from September 2024 to seek to deepen understandings and reflections around examples of researchers and policy-makers working together. Details of these seminars are available here. (recordings are available for sessions that have taken place please email here to request a link to view)
Professor Mark Boyle is the Principal Investigator on the ‘Unlocking the value of research for public policy making and innovation: Mapping Ireland’s key brokering structures and supports’ project, funded as part of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) (now Taighde Éireann) Science Policy Research programme. In the context of the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science’s (DFHERIS) Impact 2030: Ireland’s Research and Innovation Strategy, and informed by the work of the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, this project is commencing in autumn 2024 and over a two year period will undertake a comprehensive and granular mapping of research-policy brokering structures and supports currently in place across Irish Higher Education Institutions, public service research systems, and civil society organisations. More details will be made available when the project commences.