Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I hope the Howlin name continues to be carried with aplomb in Wexford.

First, I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Deputy Dennis Naughten to the Dáil in elevating the status of science in our debates. Deputy Naughten has been singularly committed to doing that and it is something that hopefully will continue even though we may not still have him in the Houses.

I want to ask for three things in the context of this debate on Science Week. One, I ask, as I did last year, that Science Week be changed to a science and design week. My second ask is that it should be marked by an audit of key indicators of progress in engagement with science across our community. The third is that we should be seeking science champions to help us adopt the innovation we need in our community to transform how we are living, which science already very largely has answers to.

Taking those in turn, I have always believed that design is the neglected element in Ireland. It is powerful in other countries and some small countries like our own have made their future from the cleverness of their design and their ability to transform very ordinary enterprises into leading-edge enterprises by having smarts in design. We have not really invested in that and by changing this to also include design, and auditing what is happening in the design world, it would be very valuable.

With regard to climate, which is I suppose a big preoccupation, and with regard to environmental damage generally, it is well known that 80% of the damage done to the environment is baked in at the design stage. Whether that is in the design of our products, of our urban living, our buildings or the design of our farm methods, this is at the heart and where many of our problems begin.

I am not going to get into it here but there are numerous examples of how we are not using resources wisely in the way we live our lives and it is back to those issues of design, whether that is in the pollution we generate, the waste we generate, or a failure to harness the capacity of our land not only to produce good food but also to rectify some of the damage that is being done. We have not fixed that design challenge in many of the sectors and I believe that we need to bring it centre stage in a more realistic way in policy.

The second request I have is to ask for an audit. It is a long time since Deputy Naughten and myself had a look at science in our schools and I confess that I have not come back to revisit the data. Female participation does not seem to me to be a great deal higher than it was 20 years ago, or whatever it was, when we looked at this. Curriculum and assessment, while it has made some small changes, is still primarily reliant on memorisation in the area of science which is wholly inappropriate for an area of learning which has got to do with lighting a flame of inquiry, not regurgitating facts that have been learned by rote. We need to detach science subjects from the slow pace of reform in other curriculum and assessment areas because it is so fundamentally different and deserves special attention.

We need to look at things like participation in BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition and SciFest, which I am glad to be going to next week. These are transformative experiences for kids who go through and yet when one looks at the list of schools, it is the same schools, year in and year out, who enter. There are hundreds of schools which never expose their students or school to competitions like the young scientists competition or SciFest. That is such a sad lack. It would not be a difficult thing to seek to drive up that participation, particularly among women students. In small things like that, if we can identify the things which can make a change and then start to work systematically from one Science Week to the next, we can seek to shift the dial on some of these items which we audit.

The last thing I would like to see is science champions to help us adopt innovation, using science in their lives. I have been involved in the discussion around climate change and one often hears people saying "listen to the science", which of course is right. One cannot negotiate with the science of climate change. However, I find many climate scientists feel that it is enough to issue the dire warnings about the direction of travel but when it comes to the solutions spoken about by Deputy Naughten, these scientists hand it back over to the political spokespersons to fix it. That is falling way short of what we need from the scientific community. We need to sponsor support for science champions to step out of the lab and of the research centre and help us with that very transformative task of innovation and the application of knowledge to the things we are doing in our daily lives.

Last week we heard the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, report that two thirds of the waste which is dumped into municipal waste should not be there in the first place. That is not a complicated issue but I will say that many families are totally confused. That is the sort of area where leadership coming from the scientific community could be very helpful.

In the farm arena, where we know transformative change is coming at us rapidly, we still, as a community, cannot turn around to farmers and describe to them what a prosperous farm will look like in ten or 20 years time. We do not have the line of sight on the environmental services which might be delivered or how we could incentivise re-wetting of peatlands or all of the many other changes that are needed there. We need the practical scientist to help us design those solutions.

I will not go into artificial intelligence and the need for us to have a clearer understanding, as politicians, as to the benefit that that is undoubtedly going to become and not be overwhelmed by the potential damage that it could equally do.

I very much welcome this debate. It happened last year and perhaps it will happen again next year, and I do not know if I will have a chance to participate if it happens next year, but we need to take a leaf out of Deputy Naughten's book, keep this to the fore and institute some real changes from this year to next year.

Hopefully the Minister of State will be here next year to report on some of the progress that has been made in the practical areas, where we could really see science transform our lives to the better.

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