Some comments here on the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies and its relationship with the needs of Ireland for socio-economic development are relevant.

It is also appropriate to touch on the Culwick concert statistics project, which was a pioneering venture into the 'philosophy of the unplanned experiment' as it later emerged in Operations Research.

Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies

When de Valera set up the DIAS he undoubtedly did a service to the group of distinguished refugee scientists, Schroedinger et al, who were responsible for triggering the process. De Valera later got global recognition for this, and was awarded the title of Fellow of the Royal Society, a title however which he seldom paraded. But the way he set it up showed that his conception of science was as 'scholarship', to be pursued in detachment, at an Olympian height.

He could have set it up as a graduate school bridge between the two Dublin universities, and this ended the then 'intellectual Partition of Dublin' which mirrored the political partition of Ireland, on a religious-sectarian basis. Instead he set it up directly under the Department of Education, as a sort of special extra-University scholarly enclave. The result was that it was sometimes difficult for students in the DIAS to register for a PhD. The regulations were waived in my case in TCD, and I had as nominal supervisor Jackie Poole, who knew little about the field; the actual supervisor was Cormac O Ceallaigh. Michael O'Connell wished to register for his PhD with UCD, but was blocked by Tom Nevin; he would have had to come in to UCD and join Nevin's group. This was at the root of the tension between O Ceallaigh and Nevin, which showed up in the international collaboration publication listings (for example the G-Stack papers).

The main conclusion is that there were serious institutional barriers to the development of a world-class science community in Dublin, and we would remain minor supportive appendages of mainstream centres abroad, where the key scientific technologies were concentrated. In such centres the interaction between cutting-edge science and key industrial technologies such as electronics would develop creatively. In Dublin, however, opportunities for innovative science-based enterprise, consequent on the presence of the DIAS, was negligible. Jerry Daly, the technician who supported our precision microscopy with customised add-ons, like micrometer eyepieces and high-precision traverses, could perhaps have considered developing a small firm to supply the world market for such equipment, but this in the then environment would not have been practicable.

Insofar as my 1950s DIAS experience interfaced with innovative enterprise of economic significance, it did so via what I might call the 'dirty statistics' involved in getting a meaningful signal out of a heavy background 'noise'. The example given below in a totally unrelated field was an initial indication of this process, which I did not recognise at the time as being of 'socio-technical' significance. In retrospect however it laid the basis for the 1960s analysis of the performance of the Aer Lingus real-time system.

Culwick Choral Society Concerts

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Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999