UNDER THE MICROSCOPE:IT IS NOT commonly appreciated that Ireland has a proud scientific heritage, but I hope that two recent publications will, at least to some extent, reverse this situation.
One is the wall poster I wrote, entitled Super Irish Scientists, published by The Irish Times in association with Barry's Tea . This was distributed with the newspaper on January 22nd last, and copies were sent to all schools. The other is a large work in two volumes, titled It's Part of What We Are - Some Irish Contributors to the Development of the Chemical and Physical Sciences, by Charles Mollan (Royal Dublin Society, 2007; €60).
The wall poster lists 18 famous Irish scientists, giving very brief biographies and scientific details of their work (see far right).
Charles Mollan's two-volume work is a massive achievement. He describes the lives and work of more than 100 scientists, including all of the scientists on my wall poster, with the exception of Denis P Burkitt (a biologist) and Jocelyn Bell-Burnell. Mollan's work is at once scholarly in its breadth and rigour, and popular in its easy, pleasantly idiosyncratic style, and avoidance of abstruse detail. He presents his subjects in their human context and not just as cardboard cut-out figures with brief personal details awkwardly appended to dry descriptions of their scientific work. Mollan's book is very good for detailed information and is a great pleasure to read.
Most of these scientists came from the Protestant ascendancy class, and this is surely one reason why their contribution was never properly recognised in the new Irish State. Of the 18 scientists on the poster, only two had a Catholic background - JD Bernal and Rev Nicholas Callan. Of course, it is readily understandable why the great majority had a Protestant background. In order to do science, you had to have the resources and the time - advantages largely denied to the Catholic population in the 19th century.
But, of course, you are no more Irish if you are Catholic than if you are Protestant. Many Protestants who had the opportunity to do science did so and did so with great distinction. They might have sat on their backsides, but they didn't. We should be, and must be, proud of them. Their genes remain in the Irish gene pool. We have recently "rediscovered" that we Irish can do world-class science in Ireland, winning research support in the teeth of international competition, and so on. But we were always world-class players. It is important
that our young people in particular should realise this.
Mollan points out, in the introduction to his book, that many Irish luminaries on the literature and political front were also from the Protestant ascendancy, but that we never had any psychological problem in seeing them as Irish and in taking pride in their accomplishments - take, for example, Swift, Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Burke.
Perhaps the reason for this is that people found it much easier to relate to poetry and politics than to the more abstract sciences. Also, science was dropped from the new Irish State's primary school curriculum in favour of Irish, thereby ensuring that a great many people had no feel at all for science.
Charles Mollan's book is available from the RDS; see rds.ie/home/index.aspx?id=1731