Sir, – Ireland risks seriously damaging its pipeline of talented researchers and its international reputation for research.The recent critique of Research Ireland’s new strategy is justified (“Research funding body neglects arts and humanities, university staff say”, Education, June 2nd). Just as harmful is the decision to dismantle the PhD scholarship and postdoctoral fellowship programmes, and to devolve the funding to universities to allocate. This decision will: 1 Shift the funding criteria from excellence regardless of discipline, idea and institution to acceptance based on alignment with institutional strategies, meaning the most innovative, groundbreaking projects and best students might not be funded;2 Devalue our PhD and postdoc funding and deny our top talent the right to say they were awarded a prestigious Research Ireland scholarship, in turn affecting their career prospects; 3 Cut off a pipeline of Irish talent to replenish and grow the full breadth of disciplines taught in Irish universities by only funding scholarships in selected disciplines;4 Shift the mode of how applications are assessed to locally configured systems that are not independently judged and which will vary across institutions; 5 Encourage prospective students and postdocs to make multiple applications across institutions to potentially secure funding, thus unnecessarily duplicating work and wasting resources for applicants and institutions;6 Harm the reputation of Research Ireland as it will isolate Ireland from European norms by not running national, independent doctoral and postdoctoral award schemes; 7 Reduce the ability of Irish universities to claim they have successfully achieved competitive, independently assessed awards, backsliding performance on global rankings;8 Tarnish Ireland’s reputation as a place of research excellence and stifle our recruitment of top talent outside of limited fields. Devolving doctoral and postdoctoral recruitment seems to be about offloading administrative responsibility and workload from Research Ireland to the universities. It is a decision that needs to be reversed to stop the harms outlined taking place. – Yours, etc,Prof ROB KITCHIN,Irish Research Council board member,Maynooth University,Co Kildare.