SOME 90 per cent of Irish territory is "undiscovered, undeveloped and underwater", and this Government is committed to its research and development, an EU Marine Task Force heard in Dublin Castle yesterday.
The marine sector will be a key element of the Government's science and technology programme, and this should be reflected in European research priorities, the Minister for the Marine, Mr Barrett, told EU officials.
Addressing the conference, which was hosted by the Marine Institute and attended by the EU Industry Commissioner, Dr Martin Bangemann, the Minister said that Ireland's Continental Shelf Area was over 10 times the island's land area. The resource was perhaps more important than for any of the 12 other EU coastal states, he said.
"We are working to develop explicit national policy strategies and objectives for the marine resource as a whole," the Minister said. The recently-published White Paper on Science and Technology fully endorsed the view that it could deliver significant economic benefit.
Also speaking at the conference, which was aimed at influencing European research and development policy, the Minister of State for the Marine, Mr Eamon Gilmore, said that this Government had given a new impetus to the sector in the 1990s and had "virtually redefined the concept of the marine".
Since the 1950s, many nations had focused on space research as the last frontier. "As over 70 per cent of the Earth's surface is under water, we should look again at the sea as our last undiscovered frontier," Mr Gilmore said.
Complimenting the Government, the EU Industry Commissioner, Dr Bangemann, said that the Irish Marine Institute was a "unique institution", as a state agency responsible for all maritime sectors.
This comprehensive approach reflected the Commission's view of its policy towards the different sectors of the maritime industry, he said. The EU Maritime Task Force had been established to reflect the importance attached to a sector which employed 2.5 million people throughout Europe, often in peripheral regions.
The Marine Institute is currently managing an EU-funded £8 million research programme, which has concentrated on "strategic" areas such as aquaculture and sea fisheries, wave energy, seaweed and mapping of the Continental Shelf.
During one of the most ambitious seabed surveys ever carried out on the Irish Continental Shelf- earlier this year, some 15 submarine canyons, each the size of the Shannon estuary, were discovered.
These canyons have potential for commercial fishing, while the identification of carbonate mounds indicated an ecological system based on methane gas, according to the institute.
