Madam, - No one could disagree with the recent tributes to Prof Ernest Walton, winner of Ireland's only Nobel Prize in a scientific discipline (physics, 1951).
A tribute such as that of Cormac Ó Raifeartaigh (An Irishman's Diary, January 3rd) is well deserved, but is there not a sense in which tributes like this are both inadequate and belated? After all, Canada honoured its first Nobel Prize winner (Sir Frederick Banting, co-discoverer of insulin) in his lifetime, and the Banting and Best Medical Department at the University of Toronto, the Banting and Best Diabetes Centre and the Banting Research Foundation still bear the names of Banting and his co-worker.
Denmark honoured Neils Bohr - and took full advantage of his scientific excellence - by founding an Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen and making Bohr its first director. Walton, already a professor at Trinity, received the chairmanship of the School of Cosmic Physics at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Study - a creditable appointment, but one which falls short of the high level of public recognition accorded to Banting and Bohr by their countries.
The sad fact is that the Irish State did not make the best use of Walton's international eminence and professional excellence to advance national science research.
The reason, I surmise, is that there were two strikes against him. The first was his connection with Trinity College, which was suspected by the Catholic hierarchy as advancing a Protestant agenda in Irish life. The second was that science itself had a "colonial" image with the nationalist governments of the State, which believed the Irish ideal to be that of a spiritually minded peasantry.
While agreeing wholeheartedly with tributes such as Mr Ó Raifteartaigh's, I cannot read them without a feeling of regret that Ernest Walton's magnificent achievement was not used to better advantage by Ireland, and that in his own country he is only now getting his full due. - Yours, etc.,
TOBY JOYCE,
Navan,
Co Meath.