Trinity College Dublin and Queen's University Belfast have been awarded €3.8 million to establish a new All-Ireland Centre of Excellence in Economics, History and Policy (CEPH), as part of the Irish Government's Shared Island North-South Research Programme. The funding was secured by a Trinity research team comprising Associate Professor Gaia Narciso, Assistant Professor Marvin Suesse, and Associate Professor Ronan Lyons, working alongside colleagues at Queen's. The centre aims to connect economic theory to real-world applications, contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and building a lasting research and teaching infrastructure across the island of Ireland.
A key ambition of the centre is to use deep historical analysis to inform modern policymaking — particularly on challenges such as global inequality and climate change. It will also provide training pathways for the next generation of economic historians, from undergraduate internships through to doctoral and postdoctoral opportunities, as well as outreach activities in secondary schools on both sides of the border.
Associate Professor Narciso, Head of the Department of Economics at Trinity and Co-Director of the new centre, described the project as an opportunity to expand ambitious, policy-relevant research and education programmes across Ireland. The CEPH award was one of 12 Trinity projects to receive funding in the first call of the North-South Research Programme, which distributed a total of €37 million across 62 collaborative projects between institutions in Ireland and Northern Ireland.