That's not my main concern here. It is rather a very odd coincidence between the stated goals of the CIA's tech outreach company (In-Q-tel) and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). The latter was set up over a decade ago without any serious consultation - particularly given the massive budget of about $1 billion. It is fair to say that SFI has been controversial; indeed there are schools of opinion that it is essentially an even more grotesque version of the Medilab debacle.
Why keep it going? Let's look at its foci per
http://www.sfi.ie/about/
essentially they are biotech and info tech.
These are precisely the same as the CIA's off shoot;
http://www.iqt.org/portfolio/practices.html
with the proviso that energy will be handled by the DOE
The apparently insane and wasteful behavior by successive Irish govts now makes some sense; it is less mad than evil
For the record, this is an open science model which I think should be adopted in Ireland, both as an education program that all science PhD students should do and as a general open science approach with a list of the resources appended;
http://universityofireland.com/m-sc-in-interdisciplinary-studies/
