Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I have no doubt that Government representatives will continue to eulogise the great history of endeavours in the field of science. That is fair enough, but we must take it with a pinch of salt. We could take it seriously if we made a start by treating the teachers of science and other key subjects with the respect they deserve by paying them an income that will allow them to live and rent homes in the places where they work. The Teachers Union of Ireland, TUI, recently polled almost 100 principals and deputy principals and found that 91% of them had experienced difficulty hiring qualified teachers of science, chemistry, maths and biology in the recent past. That is a fact which undermines all the Government's plans and promises to increase the uptake of STEM subjects in our universities.

I also note that the State has agreed to carry out a review of its support for PhD researchers, which is good news. A recent report showed that Ireland's researchers are among the lowest paid in Europe, earning a salary of approximately €18,500 per year or lower, sometimes as low as €13,000. The highest paid are in Denmark where researchers are often paid up to €50,000 per year. A significant number in Ireland must engage in part-time work, which has a detrimental effect on their research. How do we expect researchers to survive on sums often as low as €13,000? We should have less back-slapping about what we are doing in this country until we ensure that the next generation of researchers and scientists have a decent income that will allow them to live with dignity.

Similarly, the eulogising of how much we love science must stick in the gut of the medical science laboratory workers who had to strike in the recent past to achieve a decent pay rise after a decade of neglect and abuse by the State. The dispute was fuelled not just by gross pay inequality but also by the fact that 20% of medical scientist posts had been left vacant in our hospitals, leading to overwork, demoralisation and burn-out in this key group of workers.

The entire dispute was an indication of how much respect the State has for front-line medical workers.

The promise of science has been to improve our lives and to liberate humanity from the scarcity imposed by nature. Many of the great scientific leaps have done that. It is fitting, especially in the years of Covid, to think how vaccination programmes and immunisation save millions of lives each year. The World Health Organization estimates that between 3.5 million and 5 million deaths are prevented every year from diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, influenza and measles.

The issue we face when we look at scientific funding and projects is: what is the main driver for research and innovation? Is it always to improve the lives of people and humanity or is it to develop a product that can be commodified and sold for a profit? In the week that the tech workers have been thrown on to the scrap heap in their thousands, it is revealing that Facebook has spent $10 billion researching the development of essentially a virtual reality game, the metaverse. This is the vision of its founder Mark Zuckerberg in the belief at some stage that everybody will want to buy his version of virtual reality and make him richer. For this he borrowed $10 billion which is quite obscene. There is no doubt that many of the world's brightest and best young scientists in many fields have been seconded to help him achieve his vision. This is a waste of genuine human ingenuity. No doubt many of the world's leading universities and their graduates were invoked to send billionaires into space.

My point is that the use of science is not politically neutral. It can be used and developed to save humanity in many fields or abused in others. It is telling today that the biggest issue with the Covid vaccine remains the inability of much of humanity to gain access to it. In some parts of the globe vaccination rates are lower than 20% and in the very poor nations it is low as 5%. Some 2.4 billion people are unvaccinated against Covid and a staggering 90% of them live in the developing world.

In this week of COP, we can see that many of the targets and goals we have set on reducing emissions of greenhouse gases are dependent on science to deliver a magic bullet. The estimates for how much science will help reduce our emissions are often built into the models that predict warming and CO2 accumulation. We are literally gambling on the future prospect of someone somewhere inventing something to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, perhaps via carbon capture and storage, while at the same time continuing to encourage the production of oil and gas. It is largely a con but it serves its purpose in allowing the fossil fuel industry and its cheerleaders, such as some Ministers in the Government, to continue justifying extraction and development of fossil fuels on the basis that at some time in the future, science will help us remove it. Therefore, we keep drilling for gas and we may be able to find science that will capture it and store it.

We keep developing the beef and dairy sector and we might be able to feed the cows seaweed. We fill our streets with perhaps 1 million private electric vehicles as a solution to having decent public transport. We build a vast array of anaerobic digesters with the by-products of an intensive and unsustainable big agriculture model. At every turn, science is used not to address the climate crisis but to find ways to continue with business as usual. Whether it is in climate or medical science, science is under attack by those on the right as never before. A major aspect of people's scepticism regarding science is motivated because of the contradiction between profit and the motivation for the good of humanity that we see across all fields of science. Science cannot liberate humanity until we liberate science from the imperatives of profit and capitalism.

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