Niamh Brennan of Trinity College Dublin gave a wide-ranging and rich presentation This is the trouble with this conference blogging lark, when you come across such  presentation it’s very difficult to render it faithfully. I am aware that my notes become more and more incoherent as they go on. Nevertheless I record them as I have them.

Although Niamh was billed as discussing the practical issues, she spoke
about both theory and practice. "Today’s health research is tomorrow’s
health care", she said, quoting from an Irish government strategy
document, of which there seem to be more than a few.

She mentioned the Lisbon strategy, a complement to Bologna on medical
education and Barcelona and praised the Canadian and Australian
governments approaches (National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data and the Research Information Infrastructure Committee
respectively) and JISC’s Virtual Research Environments.

The Irish
government, she seemed to suggest, is very good at producing documents
on research and knowledge, but perhaps less good at practical
implementation. But the Irish have set themselves some impressive
targets. Spurred on by poor showing in university  rankings (though
Niamh pointed out the methodological flaws of these league tables) they
intend to double the number of PhD students, something that will not be
possible without attracting large numbers of students from outside the
EU.
There is not yet a national plan, she said, but there are some of the
building blocks that might form such a plan.
They have the Irish Research e-Library (IReL), a National Digital
Learning Repository,  the Irish Virtual Research Library and
Archive which can be personalised, and expertiseireland.com (though
this is not OAI compliant)
At Institutional level they have  research support systems and
infrastructure and a portal. There seems to be some portal
proliferation, she said, how many one-stop shops do you actually need?
There is also in development a national health portal, though most
people were a little sceptical about whether it would materialise.

Institutional repositories now exist at NUI Maynooth, DCU, TCD, UCD [though I couldn’t locate the last two-TR]
the first two running eprints, the second two dspace and all university
libraries now agreed to set up IRs and are working on an agreement on
metadata.