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Circumlimina; ‘Labouring the point?’

By Mark Coughlan – June 24, 2010

Good post over on relatviely new – to me at least – lefty blog, Circumlimina, about Ruairi Quinn’s conflicts? declaration… of interests.

The most striking entry belonged to Ruairi Quinn, and is notably absent from the profile on his website. In the Dáil register, we find the following:…

Go have a goo to get the nah’ledge.

The post also contains a cracking catch about the interests of another member of the political class…

I’ll spare the blushes of the Dublin City councillor who, in declaring shares in Cadbury, listed Nature of Business as “Sweets” (ah, screw him, it was [clicky-click-click the link to find out, TheStory readers].)

Nice work, over there.

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4 comments

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  1. Keith said
    on June 24, 2010

    I don’t think they understand what commercialising research means.
    It’s when the researchers and the university (because both own the new knowledge developed) try to make money from the thing they’ve invented by getting it to the market. It’s what gave us Google and PayPal, for example. In order to get the stuff to market, you generally need large wodges of cash, and venture capitalists provide that in exchange for a share of the eventual (generally rather unlikely – only about 20% of venture funded companies ever make money) profits. The rest of the profits go to the university and to the original researcher (and whoever runs the company, but that’s normally the researcher).

  2. Turlough said
    on June 25, 2010

    Keith, come off it. These are serious capitalists, they’re not in it out of altruism. They’ve identified profit opportunities and are there to exploit them. Note how much emphasis they place on Government investment in education. This is all about the NAMA Principle; nationalising risk, privatising profit. It’s also about orienting research towards the most profitable outcomes, with obviously detrimental effects.

  3. steve white said
    on June 27, 2010

    is this not agreed on policy by all parties, even socialist would agree with as long as it didn’t mean cutting more pure academic and cultural depts

Continuing the Discussion

  1. The week in Dublin: July 27 | Dublin Observer linked to this post on June 27, 2010

    [...] this week about Ruari Quinn’s potential conflicts of interest (brought to our attention via The Story). Quinn, the Labour Party spokesperson on Education and Science, is chairperson of the fund [...]

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