Seanad debates

Thursday, 11 November 2021

10:30 am

Photo of Aisling DolanAisling Dolan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House on this great week, Science Week. I was speaking earlier this morning about the activities that are going on for Science Week and I might mention some of them because they have astounded me. I was wishing we had Science Week when I was in school. Our Science Week involved the things we did around Hallowe'en and crazy experiments we came up with. Science Week is on from 7 November to 14 November so we have another few days left this week. As has been mentioned, events are happening all around the country so I invite Members to log on and find out what is happening close to them. I saw events like coding for kids, DNA fingerprinting, events in Dublin Zoo, the go fly your kite event in Cork and reptile superpowers in Celbridge. There is a bug doctor in Galway, a telescope tour in Birr, which is a place I love, a science trail in Sligo, a pint of science and a course with stand-up comedians in Tralee. I know the pint of science used to go down well in a lot of different locations with students, particularly at third level.

Science Week is a way for us to talk about careers. An awful lot of students can engage with scientists and engineers to find out what a career in science is and where they can go if they do a science degree. That is what is great about Science Week and we have a lot of communicators involved in it. It is important that we talk a lot about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, STEM, but the arts and social sciences are also important for communicating the impact of science and technology. That is something we are getting good at because we see so many science communicators emerging. It has been funded through the Science Foundation Ireland, SFI, centres of research, which means there has been a lot of outreach and public engagement and that is crucial. I wish all of that well.

I am being cheeky because I mentioned this already this morning but I am just very proud. There is a national school in east Galway, Clontuskert national school, and it was the first ever Irish school to win the climate action project school of excellence award, which it won last week at COP26. It won that award because children in this small school outside of Ballinasloe are fighting to get rid of plastic on vegetables in supermarkets and they have an amazing principal who is driving a lot of that change. They are great advocates for change.

The Minister mentioned Creating our Future and I was delighted to welcome the Creating our Future roadshow team down to Ballinasloe and Roscommon town. We had a brainstorming event in Ballinasloe and it was a wonderful way to bring everyone in the community together. We were able to invite representatives from active development associations, accessibility groups and our local Europe Direct library. It brought different representative groups together to examine what research means to them and what we want to see research on in the next five to ten years in our regional towns, as well as in our urban areas. One thing that is wonderful about this programme and that has been rolled out by SFI is that it really engaged with people in our regional and local areas and showed that science does not just happen behind high walls in labs in universities in our city centres. That is what is important about regional outreach. Mr. Brendan Smith is one of the regional outreach managers for Insight, one of the SFI centres in Galway, and he does great work.

There are many groups that do great work in engaging with schools as well, both at primary and secondary level. They also engage with groups like Active Retirement Ireland. Professor John Breslin who complied the book Old Ireland in Colour, is one of the lead principal investigators, PIs, in Insight. That book has been such a winner and they brought out a second version of it as well. It had photos in black and white from 50 or 100 years ago and that shows how data analytics can train simulations and behaviour to identify and colour in these black and white photos. I thought that was a wonderful way for people of all ages to see some old photos in colour.

I mention the Big Ideas event, which is on at the moment so I hope I get to see a recording of it. There are 12 campus start-ups out there pitching and telling us exactly what wonderful innovations they have come up with through our third level sector and that is being supported by Enterprise Ireland. Research takes place in our universities but how do we translate that impact? We do so through our arts and social sciences, our communication and through commercialisation. How do we get the impact of research out to our communities and into society as soon as possible? We saw with the vaccine that we were able to accelerate clinical trials over the period of last year. Look at what was done and at how innovation drove change. We were able to accelerate the ways we did what we have done. People thought it could never be changed before, even when it came to electronic prescriptions and so on. That shows what can be done in a time of real need and that is what is important about the commercialisation of groups like Big Ideas. We have 12 campus start-ups and I wish them the best. They are in healthcare, artificial intelligence, data analytics and technology and they are looking at driving change in people's quality of life, because that is what it comes down to. They are passionate advocates and those entrepreneurs are coming out of our research-funded systems. The Government is putting funding into SFI through the Irish Research Council that is funding our PhD students, masters students and postdoctoral students. These are the people who becoming part of these incredible SFI-funded PI teams but who then can take an aspect of that research and decide that it could have an application in the real world and that they would like to see that happen now. For example, this could include looking at the impacts of chemotherapy and hair loss and impacts to quality of life. If anyone wants to tune into that it is there until 4 p.m. I know the Minister will speak to us about it later as well.

Some of the other key areas for me were the evidence base and the Science Gallery. It is important that we support our evidence base and I welcome what the Minister is saying about the Science Gallery as well.

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