According to Silicon Republic, six researchers at Irish universities have won European Research Council Consolidator Grants, sharing in a total funding pot of €728 million. The ERC received over 3,000 applications for this call—a 35% increase—with only about 11% of projects (349 total) being successful across 25 countries. The winning Irish projects, based at Trinity College Dublin, University College Cork, University College Dublin, and RCSI, include research on AI-assisted judicial decision-making, the societal effects of loneliness, the history of European cattle farming, and next-generation therapies for bone cancer. ERC president Prof Maria Leptin called it one of the most competitive calls ever, with many excellent projects left unfunded. 38% of the winning researchers in this round are women.
AI, law, and human dignity
So, three of the six grants are at Trinity College Dublin, and they’re fascinating. Brian Barry’s JUDGEASSIST project is trying to build a framework for how judges should use AI tools. It’s not about *if* they’ll use them—they already are for risk assessment and drafting—but *how* to do it without wrecking fairness and public trust. That’s a huge, urgent question. And then Mary Rogan’s project on dignity in prisons and care homes is the perfect counterbalance. It asks: as we automate parts of justice, how are we treating the humans already in the system? Combining these fields—law, computer science, psychology, philosophy—is the only way to tackle these messy human-tech problems. You can’t just bolt ethics on later.
Loneliness, cattle, and identity
The other projects show how wide-ranging this frontier research is. Mark Ward’s study on loneliness aims to crunch data from 30 countries to figure out why it varies so much. Is it cultural? Economic? Political? We throw the word “epidemic” around, but we need this kind of macro-level data to actually understand it. Then there’s Eugene Costello’s DeepCattle project. Studying 600 years of cattle farming to understand modern trade and environmental impact? That’s the kind of deep-history work that can completely reframe how we see current industries, from agriculture to supply chain logistics. It’s a reminder that foundational industrial research often starts with understanding the past.
funding-crunch-reality”>The funding crunch reality
Here’s the thing that sticks out from the ERC president’s quote: this was record demand, and it’s a “reminder of how urgent the call for increased EU investment in frontier research has become.” Basically, even with €728 million, they’re leaving great science on the table. A success rate of 11% is brutal. For the researchers who won, like Caroline Curtin at RCSI developing bone cancer scaffolds, this grant is transformative—it lets her hire a team and pursue a high-risk, high-reward idea that could directly help young patients. But you have to wonder about the other 89%. How many breakthroughs are delayed because the funding pool, huge as it seems, still isn’t big enough? It’s a global race for talent, and as the ERC commissioner noted, this money is about making Europe attractive. But is it sufficient? Probably not.
