Now in its fifth cycle, Research Ireland’s Collaborative Alliances for Societal Challenges (COALESCE) programme supports excellent research that tackles national and international challenges. 

Following the allocation of €4.7million Research Ireland funding this year, a total of 19 projects are underway. Six of the projects are from UCD.

The funded projects demonstrate the strength of research being conducted today across a wide range of disciplines and geographies, with the potential to make a significant contribution to public policy-making in Ireland and further afield. 

The COALESCE strands are:

• Better World Awards 2024 (5 awards currently funded): Funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs (Irish Aid), these projects are supporting research collaboration and capacity-building between Ireland and target global south countries.
  
  
• INSTAR+ Awards (4 awards currently funded): Funded by the National Monuments Service of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage in partnership with the Heritage Council, the main objective of INSTAR+ (Irish National Strategic Research) is to ensure that we fully realise the potential of Ireland’s archaeological record, transforming our understanding of how Ireland’s society has evolved.
  
  
• Research Ireland Awards (10 awards currently funded): A unique programme strand in the Irish funding landscape in that it funds interdisciplinary projects led by an AHSS (Arts, Humanities or Social Sciences) researcher working in collaboration with a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) researcher.

UCD COALESCE 2024 Project Summaries

INSTAR+ Awards 

Professor Aidan O'Sullivan, UCD School of Archaeology
Early Medieval People and Things (EMPAT)
Award funding: €219,542.90

The Early Medieval People and Things (EMPAT) project seeks to create knowledge on how people in early medieval Ireland, AD 400-1100, made, used and discarded things. This includes things of the body, to the tools and equipment of the household, to the things used in the land beyond. The project will explore the social roles and physical character of material culture in early medieval Ireland in its northwest European contexts. 

Creating a range of research resources from data from Irish archaeological excavation reports, museum catalogues, and scientific literature, the project’s outputs will include an inventory of early medieval objects, academic publications, professional guidelines on best practice on object studies, an international conference/workshop on early medieval object studies in the 21st century, and a two-year programme of public community engagements using museum quality replicas, online lectures, videos and public open days.

Associate Professor Jessica Smyth, UCD School of Archaeology
First Harvests: untangling climate, chronology and cereal cultivation in Later Neolithic Ireland 3600-2500 BC
Award funding: €217,987.50

First Harvests is an interdisciplinary project combining archaeobotany and palaeoclimatology to provide new data on a crucial period of Ireland’s earliest farming story. The project will fill a crucial gap in knowledge about the development of cereal agriculture in Ireland in the centuries after its first introduction in the early fourth millennium BC. First Harvests will quantify existing archaeological records of past cultivation from the remains of cereals recovered from archaeological sites, and investigate how these records are generated under current archaeological practice. 

The project will explore the relative roles of different cereal crops and cultivation methods and how they are connected to paleoclimate records of past climate change. It offers exciting new potential for exploring and better understanding prehistoric farming systems and deep-time human-environment interactions. This combined research will dramatically improve our understanding of Neolithic and Bronze Age lifeways and social change in northwest Atlantic Europe.

Associate Professor Neil Carlin, UCD School of Archaeology
Radiocarbon Ireland: Making chronological datasets FAIR for the future
Award Funding: €219,997.50

Radiocarbon Ireland aims to transform the practice of archaeology across the island of Ireland and further actualise the potential of Ireland’s rich archaeological record (and the significant investments in it) by ensuring that large amounts of data are translated into knowledge about the chronology of Ireland’s past. 

Radiocarbon dating provides such an essential means of establishing when events happened in time that archaeologists are producing these in ever increasing quantities. However, this data is often incorrectly or incompletely reported and has not been curated effectively due to a lack of adequate training in scientific dating and data management. 

Radiocarbon Ireland will validate c.15,000 radiocarbon dates and archive them in a new open-access digital repository for transnational radiocarbon data from Ireland and the UK. It will provide training and resources on scientific dating and data archiving to counter skills shortages in these areas and maximise uptake of the repository, so that the entering of data voluntarily becomes a collective undertaking. The project will work with partners to introduce new procedures and policies in this area, and will examine patterning across the dates set to see which phenomena are being dated and how they reveal changes in research traditions across Ireland.

Research Ireland Awards 

Associate Professor Helen Lewis, UCD School of Archaeology; Co-PI Dr Alan McDevitt (Atlantic Technological University)
The Irish Palaeolithic: reconstructing human-animal adaptability and sustainability in changing ancient climates and ecosystems (PALAEO-IRELAND)
Award Funding: €218,036.75

Recently discovered indicators of human presence in Ireland from the Palaeolithic push back the known date of people in Ireland by many thousands of years. These ancient people were hunting, and possibly herding, reindeer, and using other extinct animals in a tundra-type environment, linking them with other cultures seen in Europe around 33-12,000 years ago. 

Evidence of this comes from detailed study of animal bones from Irish cave sites. The country was covered with ice in the last Ice Age, apparently erasing all traces of this long time period from the surface of the island, so the cave evidence is vital. The people using reindeer in Ireland were likely modern humans because of the dates, but there could be older remains with similar indicators. 

This project focuses on identifying species and cultural indicators from the animal bone archives to explore these issues further. The data generated will be used to model climate and environmental change over the Pleistocene and into the Holocene, to explore early human activity in Ireland, and to develop better understanding of the context of the cave bones. The research explores a window into Pleistocene Ireland, to uncover knowledge about the first people to ever live on this island.

Associate Professor James Cross, UCD School of Politics and International Relations; Co-PI Associate Professor Derek Greene, UCD School of Computer Science
The SDG_EU Project: Tracking the influence of sustainable development goals on legislative negotiations in the European Union using precision and ambiguity
Award Funding: €219,886.25

The UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) are the most high-profile political commitment to address the challenges faced by humanity in the 21st century. Despite their lofty ambitions, we do not know enough about how these overarching goals are translated into actionable policy initiatives. To address this gap in our understanding, this project focuses on the EU policymaking process, the committees that drive this process, and the nature of the policy debates that shape the nature of the resulting policy agreements. 

To unveil the influence of the SDGs on EU policy, we consider recorded 7 committee debate videos from the Council of Ministers and European Parliament, and the input/output policy texts that these committees shape. We aim to develop a workflow that first collects and processes all relevant content relating to SDG discussions in EU committees and then employs large language models to extract a comprehensive empirical picture of how precision/vagueness in committee debates shapes how SDG commitments manifest in the resulting policy agreements. We then explore how ideology, institutions, and past policy performance shape committee debates and how these debates, in turn, shape intra- and inter-institutional policy agreements that drive SD implementation. 

Without precise formalised policy commitments, there is little chance that the SDGs will come to fruition. If successful, our project will refocus our attention on the origin of such agreements (the policymaking process) and put committee deliberations at the heart of our understanding of the SDG implementation process. These insights will inform attempts to ensure the SDGs have policy bite and increase the chances that we successfully address the global challenges they confront.

Assistant Professor Rachel Farrell, UCD School of Education; Co-PI Professor Joe Carthy, UCD School of Computer Science
SECURE: Strengthening Education for Cybersecurity: Uniting Resilience and Expertise
Award Funding: €220,000.00

In today's digital world threatened by fake news, scams, and cyber-attacks, it's important to teach young children about cybersecurity right from the start. This project will develop an engaging cybersecurity programme for pupils in primary school. Taking inspiration from a junior cycle short course on cybersecurity called Cyberwise, it will focus on things like how to spot a cyber attack, making strong passwords, coding, and understanding social engineering. 

The project aims to get young children excited about jobs in cybersecurity when they're still in primary school, and to demonstrate how learning about cybersecurity can help kids develop other useful skills. It will explore what other countries are doing about teaching cybersecurity in primary schools, teaming up with experts in cybersecurity, teachers, and curriculum pros to develop a curriculum that's based on strong research and is fun for kids. 

Teachers will receive special training and after roll out of the programme, impacts will be assessed to ensure the programme really makes a difference - checking that the young children it engages with have learned more about staying secure online, developed new skills, and would consider careers in cybersecurity. The outcomes will be shared widely, so everyone can learn from the process.

The 19 COALESCE awardees under the most recent round (2024) are from the following higher education institutions / Research Performing Organisations: Dublin City University; Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; Maynooth University; RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences; Trinity College Dublin; University College Dublin; University of Galway; Addis Abba University; Agency for Scientific Research and Training, Malawi; Atlantic Technological University; Vietnam National University, Hanoi; University of Cape Town; University of Limerick, and University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

For a full list of Awardees visits the Research Ireland website.