One can't but be enthused after witnessing the energy and vigour seen at this year's Esat BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. The event, which closes at the Royal Dublin Society this evening, is as ever an effective antidote to fears that the ongoing decline in student interest in the sciences will mean an absolute abandonment of these subjects by our young people.
The exhibition featured 471 research projects in four categories, involving work completed by 1,040 first- to sixth-year students.
Yet student involvement was far in excess of this figure given that the event's organisers are now forced, due to logistics, to shortlist from a much larger pool of more than 900 project submissions. To this can be added the dozens of primary school pupils who survived regional competitions to win a place at the Primary Science Fair and display their research efforts alongside their secondary school colleagues in the RDS main hall. And beyond this there are the 35,000 visitors expected to have attended over the past three days, the great majority of them primary and post-primary students.
Last night's award ceremony delivered the expected mix of youthful excitement, flashing lights and loud music. The atmosphere is always electric, something that helps turn the main prizewinners into celebrities for the night. Once again the top four prizes for individual and group work went to complicated projects which their teenage authors still manage to describe with a disarming insouciance that belies the true depth of their complexity. Ronan Larkin,(16), a fifth-year student at Christian Brothers Synge Street, Dublin, took top prize with a mathematical tour-de-force, original research in pure mathematics that greatly impressed the judges.
While the overall event is all good fun, it does have a genuinely serious side to it. The Government has shifted the State towards a new economic paradigm, one where knowledge and not labour is the traded commodity.
Ireland will not be able to participate in this high-value game unless it has the creative research skills needed to produce new knowledge and the entrepreneurial flair to exploit it. Where are we to find the young scientists of the future if students do not see well-paid career opportunities in the sciences?
These opportunities can only be delivered through a sustained State commitment to third level and private sector research funding.
This is not optional expenditure. If the Government is serious about a knowledge-based economic future, the foundations have to be built now.