About 600 postdoctoral and PhD awards will not be offered in Ireland this year, as fiscal belt tightening continues there. The cuts, made by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), Ireland's main research agency, came to light on 6 July. “These losses are short-lived, inevitable consequences of budgetary restrictions, but the cuts were made across a broad spread of skills to avoid damaging any specific areas,” says SFI's director general, Frank Gannon. He predicts that research positions will be among the first employment offers to emerge next year, as they are a priority for Ireland's economic recovery. In April, SFI reduced the number of grants and the amount of funding for new principal investigators (Nature 465, 255; 2010).