Malcolm Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. We are discussing Ireland's membership of CERN, which is arguably the world's greatest scientific laboratory and certainly engages some of its greatest scientists, engineers and technicians. I am glad to welcome to the Public Gallery several researchers who have a specific interested in this issue. As the Minister of State is aware, CERN is focused on how our universe is made up. It has been responsible for some of the things we take for granted in many ways, including the World Wide Web, touchscreens, positron emission tomography scanners in hospitals, work that has been done in cancer care and changes that have happened in construction. Almost every European country is either a member or an associate member of CERN or has a co-operation agreement with the body, except Ireland.

We pride ourselves on our multilateralism. Where we see an organisation like CERN facilitating co-operation and collaboration among the world's top scientists, we should be at its heart. These scientists are addressing challenges that we all face, including Ireland. Approximately 16,000 scientists from more than 110 countries worldwide have been involved in some of these projects. Yet, Ireland's official policy is that members of our research community are not actively encouraged to take part because we are not a member of CERN. An equivalent Government policy, and the equivalent of what we are saying to our researchers, would be if we were to tell our actors that they could not get involved in productions in Hollywood. Another example, and the Minister of State will appreciate this, would be if we were to tell GAA players that they could not play in Croke Park. By excluding Ireland and the members of our research community from CERN, we are not allowing them to perform on the international stage.

All of us, including the Minister of State, are aware that we have top-class, global-level researchers in our universities, higher education institutions, HEIs, and research institutes nationwide who are engaged in some of the work CERN is involved in. This includes artificial intelligence, quantum computing and engineering, communications and nanotechnology, etc. We have top-class researchers in all these areas. The Government under its Innovation 2020 policy committed to examining membership. The process of discussions on membership started in 2016. In November 2019, the Joint Committee on Business, Enterprise and Innovation recommended that we join or at least commence the process of seeking associate membership of CERN. I raised this issue here on 3 March 2022 as a Commencement matter with the Minister of State, Deputy Feighan. On that occasion, he seemed to indicate that the only concern was the cost and not the principle of joining CERN.

I will use an example to illustrate this point. One recommendation in the Government's Innovation 2020 strategy was that Ireland would join several other organisations, including the European Southern Observatory, ESO, the European Life-science Infrastructure for Biological Information, ELIXIR, and the Low Frequency Array, LOFAR, network. If we look at the outcome from our membership of the ESO, we will see that Irish HEIs and companies have already benefited enormously. Partly, this is because the Government has not just joined the organisation but it has also set out a national space strategy for enterprise. The impact of this is not necessarily concerned with what studying is going on in space, which has certainly been of benefit, but with how this affects our lives on the ground. Therefore, I am not just asking that we join CERN; I also believe we should have a national strategy for CERN which ensures that we can avail of the benefits of membership and that our researchers can be actively involved.