A conference in Dublin has been told of a plan for a £30 million National Science Centre in the Dublin docklands. Dr Ian Elliott of Dunsink Observatory told the Irish Research Scientists Association annual summer school of the proposal, which is contained in a study by Dr Joust Douma, head of the New Metropolis in the Netherlands, for the Royal Dublin Society's science committee. The study was financed by Forfas, the Government's industrial development, science and technology co-ordination body.
It is understood that the site of the 10,000 square metre centre would be the old gasworks site on Barrow Street.
Dr Elliott said it was a scandal that Ireland did not have a national institution for the "hard sciences" - mathematics, physics and chemistry. He pointed out that even Belfast had plans for a £100 million Odyssey complex, which would incorporate a science centre.
The UCD registrar, Dr Caroline Hussey, told the conference that women were acutely underrepresented on the staff of the university's science and engineering faculties. Although last year 56 per cent of undergraduates and 51 per cent of those getting honours degrees in these faculties were women, they did not have a single woman professor. Only 10 per cent of their senior lecturers were women, 17 per cent of college lecturers, and 33 per cent of assistant lecturers.
About 700 more girls were studying physics and chemistry in 1993-94 than nine years previously as a result of a Department of Education project in 33 secondary schools to get girls to study science, the project's co-ordinator, Mr George Porter, told the conference.
The managing director of Hyperion Energy Systems in Co Cork, Dr Sean McCarthy, said the way to interest young people in science, technology and innovation was to make it clear that "they were a way to have fun and make money." "That will attract the kids and develop an innovation culture," he said.
He urged Irish firms and researchers to concentrate less on developing "technical prototypes" - working innovations - and more on "commercial prototypes," cost-effective and sellable innovations. It would be hard to find five Irish companies developing the latter, he said.
Mr John Patrick Sullivan, managing director of School Screen in Blackrock, Co Dublin, spoke of his development of the commercial prototype of a "digital textbook", using the expertise of Irish education centres and teachers. He believed this combination of CD-Rom and more traditional textbooks - assisted by a closed Internet Website for the use of students, teachers and parents - would have enormous potential in the international educational software market.