. . . how come scientists and innovators still don’t register on the public radar?
There’s been much talk lately about developing a “smart economy” here. My friend and fellow science journalist Cormac Sheridan counted no fewer than 27 ‘smart’ references in the recently revised programme for government.
But so far, it seems to be all talk. Gone are the dot.com days when technologists such as Chris Horn would be sure to feature in a survey of public opinion.
And today?
Not one innovator on Village magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in Ireland, for instance. Not one scientist asked for their “books of the year” by the Irish Times this weekend.
Frank Gannon may head up Science Foundation Ireland, which is spending €1.4 billion on research and development here, yet Village doesn’t register this as influential.
TCD Prof Luke O’Neill recently won the Irish Times/RDS Boyle medal for his research in immunology, yet even the Irish Times wasn’t interested in what he read this year.
The Village list makes for interesting — or should I say, worrying — reading.
From Sr Stanislas and the Pope, to Obama and IFA leader Pádraig Walshe, and several legal types, senior civil servants and politicians (Finance Minister Brian Lenihan tops the list at #1), it’s a veritable selection box.
But an amazing 16% are journalists and media celebrities, from George Hook and Joe Duffy to not one, not two, but three members of RTE’s Morning Ireland editorial team, meaning that one programme makes up 3% of the Village 100.
And that’s not counting the media barons who make the list, including Denis O’Brien, and Tony and Gavin O’Reilly.
The nearest the list gets to technology / innovation is including Intel Ireland’s CEO, Jim O’Hara, at #76.
Over at the Irish Times, where they asked pundits, writers, poets, economists and historians who was reading what this year, it was good to see at least that political historian Tom Garvin has been reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science. While UCD’s professor of economics, Morgan Kelly, has been reading up on human evolution.
For all the talk of Ireland developing a “smart economy”, we still have a long way to go it seems.
Update: thanks to Grace Labanyi for alerting me to Mark Little’s PrimeTime report on the ‘smart economy’ last night (Dec 1), which includes interviews with engineer and WaveBob inventor, William Dick, and immunologist and innovator Luke O’Neill, among others.
