Without technical knowledge, scientific museums and laboratories can be pretty uninspiring places - so what, you may ask, is the wider interest in writing a history of the same institutions? Enter Michael Collins, who asked the RDS in June 1922 to make its new lecture theatre at Leinster House available for the sittings of the Dail. The following September, the Provisional Government refused to allow staff access to the Royal College of Science in Merrion Street for military and security reasons, and thus started a process which saw the college merge with UCD. It is curious that two key institutions of this state, the Dail and the Taoiseach's Offices, should effectively be squatting in what were designed as facilities for science. The statues of Hamilton and Boyle still look down on those entering and leaving Government Buildings. The struggle for space in the block between Merrion Square and Kildare Street suggests a broader theoretical tension: nationalism versus science, perhaps even Catholicism versus science.
Nicholas Whyte is careful to argue against these stereotypes in his pioneering study of science in Ireland between 1890 and 1930. The early period saw a great expansion of facilities in Ireland, with decentralisation from the Science and Art Department at South Kensington to the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction in Dublin under Horace Plunkett and the irrepressible T. P. Gill. The 1890s also saw the completion of the National Library and the National Museum on either side of a courtyard - now, sadly, congested with railings and politicians' cars.
Science was subsequently overshadowed by national and world events, but even in the turbulent years after the turn of the century, Robert Lloyd Praeger and others led a patriotic movement to celebrate Ireland's biological heritage through field clubs and surveys. There were wrangles over whether biological specimens should be deposited in the "Imperial" British Museum, or at home in Ireland: at the height of the Devolution Crisis of 1904-5, E. W. L. Holt of the Fisheries Board was worried that his custom of sending his marine specimens to the British Museum might be challenged by an increasingly patriotic National Museum.
Sean Lysaght is a poet and biographer whose life of Robert Lloyd Praeger was published recently