Students and staff at UCC have urged the university to call for an Israeli company to be removed from an EU-funded research project that its own Tyndall Institute is also a partner in.
The university's Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) group is also lobbying the Irish Universities Association to advocate for the removal of the Israeli company, which is connected to Israel’s arms manufacturing industry.
UCC has confirmed that its Tyndall Institute is a member of the PHORMIC Horizon Europe Project, which is a consortium of eight partners working to develop programmable photonic chips. They include teams from Sweden, Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, and Israel.
Mellanox Technologies is the Israeli member of PHORMIC. Its parent company, NVIDIA, makes chips that are used in military drones, including the Lanius drone, which is produced by Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems.
A spokesperson for UCC said: "Tyndall’s participation in the consortium is limited to dealing with the Belgian-based IMEC.
"IMEC produce photonic chips, Tyndall packages the photonic chips and returns them to IMEC. Nvidia’s role in the project concerns the application of the photonic chips in data-centre applications. Tyndall does not deal directly with Nvidia."
On its website, Elbit Systems has described the Lanius drone as "a highly maneuverable and versatile drone-based loitering munition designed for short-range operation in the urban environment".
"The system can autonomously scout and map buildings and points of interest for possible threats."
"LANIUS can carry lethal or non-lethal payloads", the company states.
Israel is using remote controlled drones like Lanius to bomb Gaza, although it has not been confirmed whether or not the Lanius drone is being used there.
According to an investigation by Reuters, NVIDIA has also been implicated in exporting military-use chips to China in violation of international sanctions.
In January the news agency reported that tender documents showed "Chinese military bodies, state-run artificial intelligence research institutes and universities have over the past year purchased small batches of Nvidia semiconductors banned by the US from export to China".
UCC said its involvement in the PHORMIC project is "a long-standing matter of public record".
However, students and staff involved with the university’s Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) group criticised the college for failing to inform them of the connection during negotiations aimed at ending an ongoing encampment at the university in support of Palestine.
"UCC BDS was informed in negotiations that there were no ongoing research ties between Tyndall and Israeli institutions", the UCC BDS group said in a statement. It said this is now "demonstrably untrue".
It said: "The involvement of Tyndall in developing high-tech photonic components in the PHORMIC project, alongside the activities of NVIDIA, raises significant and urgent concerns."
"By collaborating on these projects, Tyndall indirectly supports entities engaged in the production of military drones" the group said.
"This discovery underscores the need for deep scrutiny of all institutional partnerships, with an effective directive to cut ties upon identification," it added.
UCC BDS also called on the university "to compile and release all information on research and financial connections between the Tyndall and Israeli companies/non-Israeli companies profiting from the occupation in accordance with the PACBI framework".
A spokesperson for the UCC BDS groups said it was students themselves "digging around" who discovered the information they say links UCC’s Tyndall Institute with the Israeli war machine.
Student Ainsley-Kay Rucker said: "We’ve been engaged in weeks and weeks of good faith negotiations with the university and yet we ended up making this connection ourselves through researching late into the night.
"It is incredibly disappointing to know that in the university I’ve been attending for years that the research of peers is potentially being used to promote and assist in a genocide", the Masters in Philosophy and medical ethics student said.
UCC said it "acknowledges the deeply distressing crisis in Gaza, and the ongoing violence and humanitarian crisis is utterly heart-breaking and abhorrent".
"UCC remains in constructive engagement with our Students’ Union and the BDS Group on the university’s response to the crisis, and remains committed to ongoing dialogue", it added.
