Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Naughten for suggesting that this debate should take place this week. On 14 November 2014, during Science Week as it happens, the Rosetta space probe lander module, Philae, made the first ever soft landing on a comet by a human-made object. The probe had been launched a full decade earlier and it slung itself off the gravitational pull of Mars to intercept the comet as it arced its way through the inner solar system. It was an unbelievable feat of maths, physics and aeronautics. The poor students of sixth class in Glór na Mara in Tramore had to cope with an excited teacher the next day who kept telling them that these weird and hairless primates had managed to land a washing machine on a comet and that they had done it using sums.

Science Week was always my favourite week during my teaching career and science was my favourite subject to teach. It is a great fit for primary school children, as they have not been indoctrinated out of their natural curiosity yet. Anyone who has a four-year old at home, as I do, knows of an almost infinite capacity to pose the question "Why?" over and over. That question is one of the most defining features of us as Homo sapiens; we are the thinking primate. That is why in science lessons and during Science Week in particular I used to encourage my students to ask that question. Anyone can look at a cool thing but a scientist asks "Why?". We can all look at a glass of water like the one in my hand being covered with a mat and flipped upside down but a scientist asks why the water stays in the glass, or at least why some of the water stays inside in my case. I am glad my demonstration partially worked and that the Ceann Comhairle was not here because he would have been cross with me.

Science is human curiosity formalised and given a method. It has unlocked so much of what is good and some of what is bad in today's modern world and it gives us hope for a better future that we all might be able to look forward to. We need to foster that natural curiosity in our schools and across our entire society. To do that we need to invest in our teacher training, which was referenced earlier by Deputy Sherlock, and we need to do so at primary level. Science can be one of the subject areas where our primary teachers feel less confident delivering, depending on what subjects they have taken themselves during their school career. Maybe we also need to revisit our science curriculum at primary level to see if it is fit for purpose and to see if it is a spiral curriculum that builds knowledge across a child's time in primary school. Although I have always had a love of physics, a curriculum based on biodiversity and the natural world might sit better with children of that age. There has been welcome progress at second level in participation in STEM subjects but we still have a challenge in recruiting suitably qualified teachers, which Deputy Sherlock referred to, and in offering some STEM subjects into smaller schools. I fully acknowledge the contribution by Deputy Gannon on impediments to people in accessing third level and doctorate level education. That is all true.

Science should not just be seen as a school subject or as a job but as something we should all be engaging in all of the time. As citizen scientists, be it as birders, stargazers or gardeners, all of these activities throw us into a deeper understanding of the natural world around us. The experiences of the last year taught us something about science and its pivotal importance. We have been told to trust the science and listen to it. While the pandemic has tragically claimed many lives, it could have been so much worse without advances in modern technology, including vaccine technology. Sadly we are seeing that play out across the developing world.

With that in mind I warmly welcome the announcement by the Minister, Deputy Harris, today that he is to develop the role of the chief scientific adviser to embed scientific, awareness and thinking at the heart of what we do as an Oireachtas. I wonder, in the context of COP26 this week and the publishing of the climate action plan last week, how much further along on the road to tackling climate change we would be if we had heeded the science on global warming ten, 20 or 30 years ago. We ignored the science for so long because it posed an inconvenient truth. What would today's society look like if we had made the far smaller changes that were needed then?

Former Uachtarán Mary Robinson remarked only today at COP that you cannot negotiate with science. Those may be words to haunt us but I am hopeful. I am a pragmatic optimist. I believe in the power of the human capacity to change the world for the better once we put that job of work in front of us.

I do not know if the Acting Chairman, Deputy Carey, has ever come across the infinite monkey theory. It is the idea that if you put a monkey in front of a typewriter for an infinite amount of time, it will eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare. Actually, the universe has already run that experiment. That primate was called Will Shakespeare. We are the outcome. We are the product of that experiment being run by the universe. We are the only thing in the known universe that asked the question, "Why?" - that tries to unravel the ways and workings of the wider world around us. In some sense, we are the universe looking back at itself, trying to make sense of us and trying to make sense of itself. There is something humbling and yet empowering about that thought.

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