Formed in 1835, Engineers Ireland is one of the longest-established professional membership bodies on these islands. It accredits just under 200 courses throughout the third-level sector in Ireland and provides continuing professional development and networking opportunities for its approximately 28,000 members.
It also represents a profession that reaches into every aspect of our daily lives.
Edmond Harty, president of Engineers Ireland (EI), is known for many things. He is the founder of Innovalogix, an investment and consultancy company. He sits on the board of governors of the trust behind this newspaper. He is a non-executive director of Irish Manufacturing Research, a full adjunct professor at UCD and an EY entrepreneur of the year award winner.
And he is best known for the decades spent as chief executive and technical director at Dairymaster, an innovator of dairy farm equipment with global sales.
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But first and foremost, he is an engineer. Harty studied mechanical engineering at the University of Limerick and has a PhD in biosystems engineering from UCD. To date he has filed more than 130 patent applications. This is why EI is such a natural fit for him.
“I joined back as a student and never did I think then that one day I would end up being president of such a huge institution,” he says.
For him, the discipline of engineering is at the core of modern life: “From the mobile phone we talk on to the computers we use, to the roads we travel to work on, engineering is in everything.”
That ubiquity, from medical devices to digital technology and environmental monitoring systems, means engineers are more in demand than ever, with an estimated 6,000 vacancies available across the sector.
In Ireland EI is the sole authority to award the title of Chartered Engineer, a registered professional title that is internationally recognised. But it is also working to develop the other end of the talent pipeline too. Its Steps outreach programme engages with almost 100,000 secondary school students each year.
At last year’s Ploughing Championships young people were invited to see engineering in action, including being served up an ice cream by a robot. While the event showcased just how cool engineering can be, the real driver behind such activity is the fact that it is through innovative engineering that companies in all sectors can gain competitive advantage, to the benefit of Ireland Inc.
Engineering and entrepreneurship are “inextricably linked,” explains Harty. “Engineering is about solving problems. Entrepreneurship is about looking for niches in marketplaces, tackling those problems and creating a commercial product for them.”
The mindsets of both are inherently curious, ambitious, and solutions oriented, he adds, pointing to the words of US physicist Michio Kaku, who says that what we usually consider impossible are simply engineering problems to be solved.
“Innovation is like baking a cake. What you want is to add some new ingredient to make it look better, taste nicer or give some added advantage to the customer that’s better than the alternatives out there on the marketplace, and that’s where engineering has huge ability in absolutely every industry,” says Harty.
But the profession is also innovating internally, helping to break down barriers to entry. This includes a new third-level programme to which students can apply using a portfolio as well as CAO points.
Apprenticeship programmes which lead to a degree are also growing, enabling students to “earn while you learn”, explains Damien Owens, director general of Engineers Ireland.
“There is a global shortage of engineers. Look at all the challenges we face, including water and housing shortages, the development of offshore wind farms and energy. These will all ultimately be solved by engineers, so it’s a very exciting time to get into engineering.”
As a discipline it spans everything from civil engineering to software to electrics and manufacturing. Increasingly it has a role to play in residential construction too, with more homes built in a factory and assembled on site, a huge feat of production engineering.
Traditional construction is itself being digitised, ensuring stakeholders from builder to architect to engineers are all instantly party to changes in specification, reducing costs and delays. It is engineers who will build resilience into our infrastructure too, including water supply.
“If you look at it from an overall infrastructure perspective, be it the housing, energy or water, we operate on a knife edge with all those critical services. With the population growing so fast, we’ve got to really get ahead and build so much that we can grow into it and not always be playing catch-up,” says Owens.
As director general of the Environmental Protection Agency, and vice-president of Engineers Ireland, Laura Burke has first-hand experience of the role engineering can play in solving sustainability challenges too.
“Whether in relation to climate, biodiversity, water quality or air quality, all are areas for which we need solutions,” says Burke.
Part of what makes a great engineer is imagination and innovation, including finding new purposes for old materials as part of the circular economy, she says, pointing to a retired wind turbine recently repurposed as a footbridge as a case in point.
“People often think of engineers in a more traditional way and, yes, there are lots of opportunities in traditional engineering areas such as construction. But because engineers tend to be focused on doing, and not on promoting what we do as much as we should, kids at school may not be so aware of all the great opportunities that are out there,” says Burke.
“Anywhere there is a difficult problem to address, you’ll find engineers at the centre of it. And when you consider some of the challenges we face, we need them now more than ever.”
