This 'Draft 3', dated May 18 1996, is a linear version of the hypertext construct under the same title which is on record elsewhere, as a sub-directory in the 1990s directory. It was used as the basis for the paper which appeared in Daltun O Ceallaigh's New Perspectives on Ireland - Colonialism and Identity, Learbheas, 1998, a publication based on contributions to the Desmond Greaves Summer School. In the printed version it was somewhat edited down, cutting mostly the international aspects, though not losing thereby its overall message related to the Irish context. I give it here in full [bracketing] the cuts.

1. Introduction

What follows is an agenda for what I think historians should be looking at, if they are to help us to gain an understanding of how societies develop national identities, and how nations develop economic viability through the mastery of productive processes which depend increasingly on the application of science-based technologies.

I begin with something on the Baconian(1) background to the scientific tradition, and an indication of how it has evolved in 'these islands', on the Continent, and in America. I go on to look at some current theories of nation-building, and attempt to relate these to current thinking in the historiography of science and technology. I suggest how some aspects of the history of science in Ireland might be fitted into this general background picture, and draw some parallels with the 'third world'. I conclude by suggesting a model for the development of a science culture in a developing nation-state, in the context of the emergence of a national elite.

1.1 Bacon and the Royal Society

Boyle's father was the Earl of Cork, who implemented the Munster plantation under Elizabeth, in which context Edmund Spenser (the Elizebethan poet, author of the 'Faerie Queene' etc) fell foul of the unruly aboriginals, who rejected the process, burning him out. Boyle's Irish roots were like the Duke of Wellington's ('being born in a stable does not make one a horse!'). Boyle however has a role in the culture of science in Ireland, in that he is commemorated with a Boyle Medal, issued periodically as a mark of esteem by the Irish scientific establishment, since it was initiated by Joly(4) in 1898. I will return to this, to explain what I think is its significance.

The Baconian model was the pattern for the imperial scientific establishments of France, Prussia, Russia, Austro-Hungary, indeed of all European States. There was in all cases a usually quite explicit Faustian pact with the military establishments, which contributed to the painful way in which European history has evolved.

Mini-Baconian systems on the English model were set up in Scotland and in Ireland (not to my knowledge in Wales). There was the Royal Society of Edinburgh; in Dublin there was the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in 1731 and then the Royal Irish Academy in 1784. These two (consciously Baconian) bodies were at the core of the process of the development of the scientific and technological potential for the existence of the Irish nation. Their ultimate failure to achieve impact on the thinking of the intellectual leadership of the Irish revolution in the 1900s is at the root of the contemporary cultural gap. Why was this?

[To answer this question it is necessary to begin to provide a background for an assessment of the role of the science and engineering communities in the process of nation-building in Ireland. The focus should be primarily the turn of the century, but the exercise should extend back to the 1860s and forward to the 1960s. It would need to be set in the context of the corresponding process in Europe. It is hoped that this adumbration may also present some insights into the contemporary needs of the Third World, as well as providing a stimulus for setting up academic resources capable of completing the task in the necessary depth. There is no academic department of unit devoted to this objective in the Republic at present. There is one in Queens University Belfast (led by Prof Peter Bowler, supported by Nick Whyte), which is funded from Britain. This is currently in process of doing some significant work on relatively recent interaction between science and the State in the Republic.

The Irish experience of this process has relevance for the Third World, because in Ireland the transformation and assimilation of the colonial scientific tradition into the emerging national culture is at last beginning to take place, after a long period of gestation. If the factors governing the transition can be understood in the Irish context, then perhaps in other post-colonial situations the transition can be made more rapidly and less painfully. The elaboration and analysis of the pains of this gestation is a matter for several future essays, although in passing we will give some hints or insights into it, where it is necessary to explain a particular emphasis in the review of the European and Third World experience.

In this background study, it is my intention first to touch on current theories of the nation-building process, and then to go on to examine the current tradition and practice of contemporary science historians, exposing the limitations of their emphasis on science as a topic to be analysed in isolation within discipline from the perspective of the core-European imperial States.

To this I would counter-pose the need for the analysis of the role of science, and its relationship with engineering, technology and enterprise development, in the formation of the small-to-medium fringe States on the European continent, and the comparison of the Irish experience with the latter. Preliminary assessment of the scale and quality of the Irish S&T community in the 1900s suggests that it stands up to this comparison.

It is also appropriate to consider the relationship of the scientific and engineering communities with the imperial process and its military system. The central imperial powers have imposed a Faustian role on science, and certain questions suggest themselves in the context of the analysis of science in an imperial-colonial context.

Here the Irish scientific enterprise has in the past taken on a role of active participant in the imperial process, rather than a victim, though its potential for the future is positive.]

1.2 America and France

When American democratic ideas were taken up in France, reinforcing the European Enlightenment, there was already in existence a central imperial State, with Baconian institutions, which influenced the flavour of the democratic revolutionary aftermath, pushing it towards the Bonapartist (proto-Stalinist) model. This favoured scientific technology, under the Faustian pact, and the Ecole Polytechnique became the focus of the European scientific core, with England relegated to fringe status. (The focus later shifts to Germany, and then in this century to the USA. but this is another story, with which scientists will be familiar).

In Ireland and Scotland in the 1790s the link with the European core was closer than it was in the case of the US, and there was mobility of people. French influence on science in Scotland (the 'Scottish Enlightenment') and Ireland was considerable, and the English were leapfrogged. In Ireland by the 1800s the RDS was consciously on the way to becoming a technological university on the Ecole Polytechnique model(4). Had the United Irishmen established their pluralist democratic republic in the 1790s, under American and French political influence, they would have had access to European core-quality science, organised as such, on the Baconian model.

2. Theories of Nation-Building

There is also an objective element, in that a national identity is associated with a 'high culture' which is a supported by an elite. Gellner goes into this at some length, with a classification of the various types of nationalisms which have emerged in Europe. He tends to overlook, however, that aspect of 'high culture' which is represented by science, and the associated technological competence, which provides the industrial basis for the realisation of national aspirations.

The development of this aspect of the Gellner model in this context, and its contrasting with Marx's concept of 'basis and superstructure', is the subject of a future essay.

Suffice it to say, at this stage of the argument, that we are starting from the assumption that if a viable national identity is to assert itself, with the emergence of a national elite, it is necessary that this elite contain sufficient scientific and technological competence to underpin the basis of the economic life of the nation, to the extent that the key economic decisions can be made without undue dependence on foreign knowhow.

2.1 Contemporary Historiography of Science

In this context, scientists having roots in, or connections with, Ireland get quite a respectable mention, as contributors to the mainstream of scientific work. Doing rough statistics on the index is not a vary satisfactory measurement procedure, but 'faut de mieux' let us see what it suggests.

There are some 16 items under Britain/British, 10 under France, 8 under Germany, 2 under Scotland and 1 under China. There are none under Austria or Italy, though if you search you do find the names of the 2 main Italian academic bodies. There are 4 under the USA, but none under Russia. Mendeleev gets a mention, Pavlov doesn't, nor does Kapitza; The Russian scientist Hessen gets 6 mentions, presumably because of his famous impact on the 1931 history of science conference in London.

Thus when we have a systematic compendium by the Leeds group, with 67 topics covered by 61 authors, we are presented with a reasonable sample from which the perceptions of mainstream science history can be culled. It is evident that science is centred in the European core-group of major powers: England, France and Germany, with the US coming in as a late arrival, and everyone else being peripheral.

The perception of Nandy, and indeed, McMillan(see below) of Baconian science as being an imperial tool would appear to have substance.

Now consider the name-index in Olby et al. Tyndall (Carlow) gets 3 mentions: the legendary 1874 Belfast Address to the British Association (where he banished the theologians from cosmology), and 2 mentions on the role of creative imagination and emotion in science. William Thompson (Cork) the Owenite gets a mention in the political ideology section. The other William Thomson (Belfast), without the p, later Lord Kelvin, gets 7 mentions. Larmor (Galway) gets 4, Hamilton (Dublin) gets 6, Boole (Cork) 2, Boyle (Lismore) all of 17, but then wasn't he among the founding fathers. Bernal (Nenagh) (7) gets 3 mentions.

Nowhere is there any mention that any of these significant contributors to mainstream science had a connection with Ireland; it is simply assumed that they were all part of the British mainstream, which, in a sense, they were.

Consider a few well-known names(8) in science associated with nations outside the Olby et al core-group. Arrhenius (Sweden) gets a mention, Berzelius doesn't. Oersted (Denmark) gets a mention, Eotvos (Hungary) doesn't. Bohr (Denmark) gets 10 mentions. Bose (India) gets 1.

What this (admittedly crude) analysis suggests is that in the perceptions of contemporary English historians of science, the contribution of scientists with connections with Ireland is considerable, and is comparable to or perhaps even greater than the perceived contributions by other comparable nations outside the core- group.

It is interesting that the Scottish identity is perceived and differentiated; this is perhaps because of the positive role played by the Scottish education system in enabling English dissenting scientists to get an education, at a time when the universities in England and Wales would have been barred to them. Scientists originating in Scotland are usually given credit for their nationality because of this perception.

2.2 Historiography of Technology

The key to the rapid expansion of knowhow that led to the industrial revolution in England was the proliferation of voluntary associations which made the scientific understanding generated by the work of the Royal Society, and disseminated in its publications, available to the expanding literate artisan class.

According to Inkster(9) by the time of J S Mill (1848) there were some 1020 organisations in England and Wales of which the majority involved the artisans and labour aristocracy; their total membership was some 200,000. The amount of mental capital involved in this culture of ingenuity far exceeded the physical capital involved in land, buildings or equipment.

Key elements in this process were the Mechanics Institutes. There was no barrier between science and technology in the early years of the industrial revolution; artisans would read the transactions of the Royal Society where they dealt (for example) with ore chemistry.

This is the background against which Tyndall's (10) early association with the Mechanics Institutes, and Fitzgerald's(11) concern with technical education in Dublin, must be assessed.

Inkster charts the transfer of the technologies associated with the steam revolution across Europe. Where they were able to be taken up and understood by a literate and ingenious artisan class, they took root and developed locally, as in Belgium, France and Germany. Where, as in Russia, they remained in enclaves, manned by foreign technical people, in a sea of illiterate serfs, development was delayed.

In the case of India, Inkster shows how the British were actively hostile to the development of technical education accessible to the Indian working people, and how the demand for this was expressed through the Indian Association for the Advancement of Science (founded in the 1870s). Thus in India the demand for science-based technical competence to be available to the working people formed part of the culture of the national movement.

In the Irish case, Inkster instances the 40-lecture RDS laboratory course of William Higgins, which started in 1798. This was in the context of his analysis of the mainstream of the Industrial Revolution radical dissenting culture, fortified by a stream of engineering talent coming in via Scotland.

The role of the RDS as an emergent College of Technology, having links with France, has been treated by McMillan(12).

3. Small-to-medium Peripheral States

It might be argued that in comparing publications like this, which review comprehensively well-defined topics, one can perhaps 'normalise the signal' on references to those universally acclaimed 'international luminaries' in the Crawford (14; see also below where I expand on her work on the Nobel Prize process) sense, like Einstein, Maxwell or Bohr; and then draw conclusions about the perceived roles of the others.

On this convention, it could be argued that in the Olby et al perception Hamilton and Lord Kelvin count as 'universally acclaimed'.

(This procedure of course ideally would require that the scopes be comparable; in this case the scope of Olby et al is broad, while the Bernhard et al is finely focused on a well-defined period, which happened to include Fitzgerald.)

What this suggests is that the view from a nation (such as Sweden) outside the central core-group (Britain, France, Germany) is more likely to be defensive of its own national identity, and to be uneasily conscious of core-group hegemony, and therefore perhaps generous to other fringe-nations.

The reference to Fitzgerald is interesting; it is in an article by Heilbron (15) on 'Fin-de- Siecle Physics', and it relates to the question of equivalence between matter and energy, and the nature of the 'ether'. Ostwald proposed the idea, but his German chemist friends rejected it with contempt. Fitzgerald '..answered for the British: "that may be all right for the Germans, who plod by instinct, but a Briton wants emotion in his science, something to raise enthusiasm, something with human interest"..viz a mechanical model.'

What I find interesting here is not the perceived Britishness of Fitzgerald (he was hard-core Unionist; Parnell if he had come into office under Home Rule would have had difficulty in retaining him in Dublin as a link into world-class science; this is at the core of the problem of Irish cultural and national identity(11)) but the fact that he takes a basically human view, similar to Tyndall in the Olby et al quote mentioned above. It is a long way from the Gradgrind image of the scientist in English literature; it is closer to the creative Irish Protestant tradition which has dominated Irish literature, with Wilde, Shaw, and Yeats.

Elisabeth Crawford(14), who was one of the co-editors with Bernhard of the Nobel symposium material, has used the Nobel Prize awards as a method of analysis of the role of nationalism and internationalism in science. In this contest she provides some further insights into centre-periphery relations. (She also analyses the effects of World War 1 on scientific relationships between the protagonists, but this while of interest is not immediately relevant to the current argument.) The periphery here is eastern and central Europe, primarily the Austro- Hungarian Empire and successor-States. She makes use of Ben-David's model(16) for her analysis, with some critical addenda. I dwell on this because it suggests an approach to the analysis of science in Ireland viewed as peripheral to Britain as core, against the background of which its role in the emerging national consciousness can be assessed.

The basic methodology goes back to Alphonse de Candolle(17), a Swiss naturalist, who counted the foreigners elected to membership of the 3 major Academies in London, Paris and Berlin. Dividing this by the population of the country concerned, he came up with a statistical measure of the 'unit scientific value' of their populations.

He can thus claim to be the inventor of modern scientometrics, with a procedure which was quantitative, hypothetico-deductive and comparative. The fact, commented on by some, that de Candolle's thinking was dominated by racialist and male-chauvinist philosophy is irrelevant; he made an approach to the problem from the angle of the scientific community in a small peripheral country, with aspirations to central status. His analysis was restricted to approaching the various national scientific populations with a classification by religion, social class, family tradition; he did not get round to the institutional and organisational background in the national environment.

De Candolle concluded that 'the more the sciences progress, the more difficult it is for peripheral or newly civilised countries to do battle with the ones at the centre'. This early insight emerged again a century later as the main theme of the Ben-David analysis.

Ben-David added new dimensions to the analysis of the comparative development of science in differing national environments:

(a) the organisation of science into disciplines, specialities and research schools;

(b) the extent to which the status of the people who practice science can be considered 'elite';

(c) the division of the world into 'centre' and 'periphery' and the location of the national environment in that context.

The key feature of the organisational analysis in Ben-David is that in the countries which became 'central' (England in the 17th century, France in the 18th, Germany in the 19th and the USA in the latter half of the 20th centuries, roughly speaking) the organisational structures for research were competitive. The competitive environment at the centre produced the innovations which raised the general level. Peripheral countries adopted the innovations, usually with a time-lag, often further delayed by linguistic barriers, and adapted them as best they could. Organisational structures at the centre tend to be copied at the periphery.

The 3 pioneering 'central' States retained their overall centrality, while the overall centre of gravity shifted about among them.

In eastern Europe the educational system was already modelled on the German. Crawford looks at the institutional arrangements for research, the intellectual innovations produced at the periphery, the recognition they got at the centre, and the emergence of specialities and work orientations specific to the periphery.

To do this she takes as raw material the 81 Nobel Prize nominators and nominees for physics and chemistry in Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia from 1901 to 1939. Note that she does not take the actual winners; this would be too small a population. Those who made it to nominator or nominee status however form an accepted elite and a larger population.

(It would not be feasible to do this for Ireland, as the numbers would be too small. It would however be possible to devise an analogous selection process in the context of the award of the status of FRS, of which in Ireland in the 1890s-1900s there were a significant number.)

With this population she analyses:

1. dependence on the centre for training in the career paths;
2. the innovative status of the research orientations of the nominees;
3. recognition of their work by citation at the centre;
4. specific research styles (eg the Exner Circle).

At this point it is appropriate to return to the Irish context, and to make use of Sir Robert Kane as an example of the role of a key scientist with mainstream standing in a peripheral situation.]

3.1 Kane and the 'Industrial Resources of Ireland'

Kane picked up chemistry from the Higgins RDS lectures after school. He went to pursue his scientific studies in Germany and in 1829 discovered a manganese arsenide in Saxony, which was named Kaneite.

He went on to discover the ethyl radical, and was able to claim priority over Liebig(8), with whom he subsequently worked in Giessen in 1836. He worked in the RDS, mostly on organic chemistry; his process for converting acetone to mesitylene was the first to build a ring from a chain, and was acclaimed by Berzelius. In 1840 he became editor of the Philosophical Magazine of the RS, and in 1849 became an FRS. Kane's Elements of Chemistry 1840-41 has 1200 pages and 200 wood-cuts. Faraday introduced it to the Army course at Woolwich, and the American edition in 1843 was adopted as the US standard university course.

Kane's Industrial Resources of Ireland was published in 1843. This was the bible of Irish national techno-economic development for the next century, remaining so right up to de Valera's time, long after the technologies he outlined had become obsolete or irrelevant. It is one of the great Irish 'might-have-beens': if the Young Irelanders had succeeded, and the effects of the Famine contained by a sympathetic national State, Kane's ideas would have had some chance of being realised.

3.1.1'Godless Colleges'

(The analogue in modern times would be if there had been a demand in South Africa for a segregated black university!)

The consequence of this ban was that the key Baconian institutions, the RDS and the RIA, remained as the intellectual foci of the Protestant colonial nation: basically the landed gentry and the Trinity College elite, without enrichment from the rising Catholic middle classes.

Yet they did exist as the scientific foci of an Irish geographical entity, with an economic life, and a national potential. This could not help breaking through. The Protestant scientific elite were divided: some (like McCullagh, Haughton, Preston) looked to the emerging pluralistic geographical nation, with Davis and Parnell, others (like the Earl of Rosse, his son Parsons of steam turbine fame and Fitzgerald) to the then emerging and world-dominating British Empire. The full analysis of this contradiction remains to be done(18), but broadly speaking in the early 1880s the Academy was Home Rule inclined, under the leadership of the then aging Kane, while the RDS focussed the interests of those who looked to the Empire, led by Fitzgerald and Stoney(19).

The extent of the frustrated potential of the Catholics for science is illustrated by the case of Callan, who was professor of physics in Maynooth, and had encountered Galvani and Volta when in Rome studying for the priesthood. He was practical and inventive, but in the Irish Protestant colonial scientific context was an outsider. He invented the induction coil, usually attributed to Rumkorff. Callan's priority was not generally established until an article in Nature in the 1950s. The effect of the Catholic ban on the 'Godless colleges' cannot be overestimated. If the Queens Colleges had been allowed to thrive, Callan would have been part of a vibrant nation-wide scientific research community, with an inside track into electro-technology.

3.1.2 Publication Pattern

Stoney and Fitzgerald in the 1890s foresaw this trend and tried to stem it, with an unsuccessful attempt to do a deal with Edinburgh against London, in the interests of local publication. (There was an embryonic national consciousness lurking there, even among the Baconian imperial elite).

The RDS, after its 'belle epoque' with the French connection in the 1800s, had a publication hiatus until the 1850s, when it started again, rising rapidly and peaking in the 1880s, when Fitzgerald led the walk-out from the Academy, and again in the 1910s, led by Joly. In its prime the RDS Proceedings was peppered with papers by FRSs, and were in the mainstream of European cutting-edge technology; they were exchanged with all the main European scientific foci. This momentum continued up the the 1920s, and the bicentenary in 1932 was a gala event, attended by every member of the Free State Government; there was a scientific exhibition, and a ball. After this however RDS publications declined, and in the 1950s they were at the 1850 level. There was a revival in the 60s and 70s when the RDS was adopted by the rising Agricultural Science fraternity, but it has now declined again, and publication has virtually ceased.

A significant proportion of the papers published by the colonial scientific elite in the peak period of the 1910s were to do with the Faustian pact with the imperial military establishment. Sir Howard Grubb FRS was influential in the RDS at that time, and his optical works in Rathmines supplied the British Navy with gun-sights, as well as the world with astronomical telescopes. There was also a significant amount of publication based on field-work done in India and elsewhere in the imperial context.

The setting up in 1898 of the Boyle Medal as a means of showing peer-esteem for scientific work done in Ireland can, I suggest, be interpreted as imperial triumphalism. Boyle was celebrated in the RDS as one of the Baconian founders of the Royal Society, rather than as someone of Irish origin (cf Joly's RDS discourse on the occasion). Joly, who was the inheritor of Fitzgerald's mantle, would have been celebrating the defeat of Parnellite Home Rule, and the recovery of the RIA from nationalist domination.

The subsequent history of the Boyle Medal is of interest, and I hope to be able to analyse it in due course. It became for a period, post-1921, an indicator of good work of national significance, but as time went on, the means of identifying such good work became more difficult, as local publication went into decline.

In the 1930s an unsuccessful attempt was made to displace Boyle's name from the Medal, and substitute that of Kane; this was led by Felix Hackett, who was of the first flush of Catholic scientists who came though UCD, under McClelland(20). Hackett however was scientifically in discredit, as having been associated with the N-ray canard(21) in the 1900s.

It is no good substituting 'being politically correct' for doing good science. The first flush of UCD people in the 1900s were enthusiasts and did much good work; in a situation when new things were being discovered and old paradigms overturned some errors of judgment are perhaps inevitable.

[3.2 Core-Journal Publication

As regards recognition at the centre, according to Crawford the key factor is publication in core journals. This message by the 1930s had certainly got across to scientists in Ireland, and publication in the Proc RIA and Proc RDS declined.

The present writer, when he was publishing in high-energy nuclear physics in the 50s, went for the Physical Review, the Phil Mag and Il Nuovo Cimento. Publication in either of the Irish journals was actively discouraged from the top; it was considered more relevant to seek esteem in the international high-energy physics community than in the scientific community in Ireland. The scientific elite in Ireland in the 50s had, with some honorable exceptions, abdicated any claim to leadership in the context of the national culture, perhaps because in the previous decades they had attempted to do so and mostly had been rebuffed.

It is perhaps worth remarking that Il Nuovo Cimento, which in Crawford's analysis would count as a fringe journal, achieved core status for a period in the niche market represented by the high-energy nuclear physics community, thanks to the status of Amaldi, Fermi, Rossi and others(8), an example of the Exner process (see below).

This issue had previously been addressed by Fitzgerald and by his uncle Johnstone Stoney(22), when it was beginning to appear on the horizon. Both 'took a hard line' on the importance of local publication; cross-links with Scotland were discussed, as a counterweight to the machinations of the London elite, of which both were critical. Thus this key factor affecting peripherality, identified by Crawford, was anticipated by the scientific elite in Dublin in the 1890s.

The Exner circle is an instance of the procedure whereby a leading innovator mobilises people and resources round a programme in a well- defined problem area. Exner pioneered the Vienna Institute for Radium Research, and developed a research style in which innovative approaches to instrumentation were important. They explored, among other things, atmospheric electricity, and one of the circle, Hess, was the discoverer of cosmic rays. Schroedinger was also part of the circle. The Exner group got into controversy with Rutherford in Cambridge in the 20s over the extent of the applicability of the alpha-particle bombardment approach to disintegrating the nuclei of light elements.

Despite excellent instrumentation, the Exner group in the end admitted defeat; the measurements in the last resort depended on the human eye's ability to pick up scintillations. There was a link with Sweden via Pettersson, who was a student of Arrhenius. This was an attempt of the fringe to unite and beat the core, which failed.

It is relevant that at about the same time, the Radium Institute was set up in the RDS in Dublin, on the initiative of Joly(3), primarily to supply the Dublin hospitals with radon gas in glass needles for use in cancer treatment, a method pioneered in Dublin.

This might be taken as an example of the work of a 'favourite son' (Joly) taking up the role of 'stay-at-home innovator', taking advantage of the niche provided by the international prestige of the Dublin medical establishment.

Shortly after this Walton(23) and then O'Ceallaigh(24) went to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, on the basis of which subsequently they achieved 'international luminary' status, Walton to the extent of the Nobel Prize, O'Ceallaigh however less so, and without significant recognition within Ireland.

In conclusion, it can be said that the Irish scientific potential, at the start of the nation-building period, and during the early stages of independence, was close to 'core' status, and was quite comparable with, or even superior to, that in comparable peripheral States. It can be argued that the neglect of this important aspect of the national intellectual capital was among the factors contributing to our relative decline, as tracked by Joe Lee(25).

I have said enough about the core-fringe question to suggest that there is a good basis for the adaptation of the Crawford methodology to the analysis of the Irish scene as it has developed in this century. The Irish situation is peculiar in that there is no language barrier, and at the start of the period the Irish scientific establishment was accepted as 'core'; this perception has persisted and is in evidence in the Olby et al compendium.

The Irish scientific establishment was to some extent hostile to political developments within Ireland on the grounds that they did not want to be relegated to fringe status scientifically, nor were the Protestant component comfortable with the Rome Rule spectre.

However once the State was established, they made efforts to keep the scientific establishment high in the esteem of the scientific core, despite obstacles generated by the relative indifference on the part of the new State, which was not aware of the importance of science, at least initially.

An aspect of this State indifference is, paradoxically, that the Free State was not attempting to support a military-industrial complex, as had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The need for scientific technology in national survival, as perceived in the 20s, had a uniquely military dimension. This brings us on to the next section, and the Faustian pact.

4. Science and the Imperial Military System

This process has been studied comparatively by Pyenson(26), who after a devastating introduction in which he quotes Levi-Strauss '...coming on the shadows of the remnants of Eden, Western man set out to destroy them...' goes on to classify the role of the scientist in the empire as:

(a) the functionary role; 'gather results, do as you are told, we will analyse them at the centre in the imperial interest...';
(b) the implanted research role; participate in a research centre implanted in the colonies in the hopes that it will help in the civilising mission;
(c) the merchantilist role; skilled expatriate applied-scientists in support of a colonial industrial technology.

The functionary role is typical of the French in North Africa; this has been written up by de Martonne(27). The research role is exemplified by the Gottingen scientists who argued in 1908 for the setting up of an astrophysical observatory in Windhoek, in German SW Africa (now Namibia). The merchantilist role is perhaps the contemporary norm.

In the Irish context, the first role is perhaps exemplified by the Irish Lights, or the Geological Survey, or the Ordnance Survey, when run from Britain. Post 1921, of these three the first was left untouched (under a Treaty clause which sought to prevent the Free State developing a maritime interest), while the second and third were taken over, without proper understanding of their significance, by the Dublin Civil Service, and neglected for decades; the philosophy of their original imperial mission was not replaced by a substitute philosophy of national development.

The implanted research-centre role was never high on the agenda in the epoch of British rule; any research centre developed in Ireland pre-1914 (eg the Albert College for agriculture) had to be fought for (in this case by Horace Plunkett and the co-operative movement).

(It could be argued that de Valera picked up the concept of the implanted research centre in the context of the foundation of the DIAS, and thought he was doing a good thing; after all was it not a well- tried European model?

There is much to be learned, positively and negatively, from the DIAS experience, and the Crawford analysis of the central European periphery gives some useful leads. It is not relevant here to go into the details of the organisational arrangements, except to mention in passing a composite known as Cosmic Physics, which attempted to unite in one discipline meteorology and geophysics. This was under the influence of Julius Hann, who was Director of the Central Office of Meteorology and Geodesy in Vienna, and Professor at the University. Hann imposed the provision that cosmic physics be made obligatory for teachers in secondary schools, and this gave it some university momentum. The fields however share few common concepts or methods, and after World War 1 the discipline lapsed into nominality. It could be argued that with modern satellite technology the fields are again becoming unified, but this is another story.

De Valera would appear to have picked up the Cosmic Physics concept from this source, when assembling the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies in the 40s, as a refuge-enclave for continental physicists. Janossy and Pollak were respectively from Austria and Hungary; Janossy was a cosmic ray pioneer, and Pollak was an innovative meteorologist. The 'School of Cosmic Physics' label united them in no 5 Merrion Square, and their work shared to some extent a common technical basis, but their scientific fields had little intellectual contact. They were ably supported technically by Jerry Daly, who perhaps can be said to have inherited the Fitzgerald tradition via Bolton St College, now part of the Dublin Institute of Technology. The label 'Cosmic Physics' however has sometimes generated comment; it has a slightly quaint air, and those aware of its Austro- Hungarian history would smell obsolescence and provincialism.)

The merchantilist role was on the whole irrelevant, as Ireland was not top of the imperial agenda as a source of extractive raw-materials. The Belfast industrialists had their own sources of expertise, and indeed were world-leaders in their niche.

So on the whole Ireland does not fit cleanly into any of the Pyenson categories, being too close to the core.

On the other had, a look at the RDS and RIA proceedings of the period suggests that Ireland was participating in the analysis of data brought back from the Empire by itinerant functionaries, and profiting by it.

4.1 The 'Faustian Pact', [colonial and post-colonial]

The decline of the Irish economic situation, relative to comparable countries like Denmark, in the post-Treaty period, may be attributed to this failure to keep up the available scientific momentum and divert it from British military to national objectives.]

[Post 1921 however] the Irish Free State was not an imperial country, and did not have military aspirations. The traditional role for Baconian scientific institutions was in support of the major European imperial States.

The Irish mini-Baconian system was an offshoot of the British Empire; it has had its occasional dallyings with national aspirations on the American colonial pattern; it has helped to set up all the Baconian institutional trappings of European nation-statehood: the National Museum, National Library, Botanic Gardens, Ordnance Survey, Geological Survey etc. All these were in existence before the State was established. The infrastructure existed for the continuation of a vibrant scientific culture, and its conscious development towards the national interest.

What happened? Nothing. There was no attempt made to replace the imperial objectives of the old system with new national objectives, to develop a post-Baconian system in which science was dedicated to supporting the development of the new nation, and to serve the people. The infrastructure was simply allowed to atrophy, under a scientifically illiterate Civil Service.

This neglect persisted right up to the 60s, when in the light of a somewhat scathing OECD Report(28) the State set up a National Science Council. This however was an appointed body, and science policy has since then developed on the basis of State centralism, with appointed boards etc.

The old Baconian institutions, with their basically healthy traditions of peer-review and democratic structures, have been allowed to persist with a somewhat nominal existence; they never assumed with the State in Ireland the status that the Royal Society has with the State in Britain.

[4.2 A Third-World View of European Science

There is a critical analysis of the founding father, Bacon, by J K Bajaj: '..that a corrupt judge and an unscrupulous politician should be the prophet of a new science and a new society perhaps reflects the nature of that science and society..'.

Bajaj goes on to analyse in some depth the procedures suggested in the Novum Organum, and finds them wanting in many respects, primarily in the orienting of all knowledge in the direction of the search for power over both man and nature, while insisting that this knowledge has some unique validity. Such a philosophy is inherently violent. Bajaj quotes Ghandi: '..this civilisation is such that one only has to be patient, and it will be self-destroyed'.

There are trenchant criticisms of how reductionist science has destroyed Indian environment and culture via pesticides and major engineering works, and there is an analysis by Shiv Visvanathan of the role of British rule in India as a realisation of a human laboratory, in the Baconian tradition. One is reminded of Sir William Petty's Baconian plan for Ireland.

Typical of the laboratory role for India, in the grand Baconian plan, is the work of Haffkine, who is officially revered as a pioneer of public health in India; there is a plague research institute in Bombay called after him; he has been commemorated on stamps.

Haffkine came to India to test the results from the Pasteur Institute in Paris regarding the potential of the anti-cholera vaccine. This vaccine had been developed under the stimulus of the need for the European military machines to immunise their troops against the diseases which followed on insanitary conditions in wartime. The cholera epidemic in Bombay lasted for years, and Haffkine actively opposed measures (like sanitation and hygiene) which would have controlled the plague at source, preferring to allow it to run its course, enabling him to have an ongoing human laboratory to perfect his vaccination procedures.

At the same time in Egypt, a similar plague was brought under control within 6 months, by the introduction of lime-washing and garbage disposal, under Sir John Rogers, who was Director General of the Sanitary Department.

Vishvanathan had not picked up the motivation of the Haffkine programme; had he known it, it would have strengthened his argument. I picked this up from another source (30), a TCD quatercentenary publication, which gives the lives and times of some 40 medical scientists. There is here a reference to Haffkine in relation to Almroth Wright (1861-1947), in which it emerges that Haffkine's concern with cholera was motivated by the needs of the military to immunise armies against wartime disease hazards.

5. Conclusions

There is a background in the comparative historiography of science which suggests a core-fringe model (Crawford, Ben-David), in the context of which science in Ireland can be seen to some extent as participating in the core (due to proximity to England and mobility of personnel) but institutionally to be fringe. In the historiography of science the problem of how scientific knowledge transforms itself into technological utility, in the specific national context, tends not to be addressed.

In the background comparative historiography of technology emphasis is placed on ease of access to scientific knowledge via technical education of artisans, innovators and entrepreneurs (Inkster). In this context in Ireland the key role of the movement for technical education needs to be analysed, and its relationship (or perhaps lack of relationship?) with the emerging national cultural and political movement. The association of prominent core-science figures, such as Tyndall and Fitzgerald, with technical education is noteworthy; the relationship of this aspiration with the perceived benefits of core- association with the British Empire, and the Faustian pact with the military-industrial complex need analysis.

The relationship of scientific knowledge to the needs for independent democratic development of nations emerging from under imperial hegemony is complex; clearly the type of knowledge generated by what has come to be seen with hostility as the Baconian imperial scientific machine is not often relevant to their needs.

There is a need to develop a post-Baconian model, in which appropriate institutions are developed to empower people to use scientific knowledge in the generation of utility in a sustainable ecologically benign economic system, and to decouple science from its Faustian pact with the military-industrial complexes of the imperial powers.

There exists in Ireland core-quality science, with a long tradition, in a technologically and economically fringe situation, without State commitment to military-industrial R&D, a combination which perhaps is unique in Europe, and capable of providing a laboratory for the research and development of the benign post-Baconian developmental model suggested above.

Perhaps Porter's(31) critical core-physicist's analysis of the Third World fuel-wood crisis can be regarded as the first swallow of the Irish post-Baconian summer?]

5.1 Science and the Nation: Notes Towards a Model

I can begin by suggesting a rule for what will happen if scientists are not consciously involved in the nation-building process. The rule is that they will seek esteem within their discipline, and will publish to this end, and will migrate to the core where the action is. This would appear to be primarily the case with Wales, and also with Scotland, though perhaps less so, insofar as the existence of the RSE acts as a national focus.

Despite the existence of an old-established Baconian institutional tradition in Ireland, this rule also holds, as scientific organisation has largely been allowed to atrophy, though for a time it looked as if there was enough of a critical mass to sustain local publication and esteem generation, and a status such as to make the State aware of science as an important factor.

There has to be a strong and transparent contract between the national movement, or the emerging national State, and the scientific and technological community, on the basis of mutual recognition and respect. This contract should avoid the Faustian role which is endemic in the Baconian tradition. We can perhaps define the science-State relationship as being 'post-Baconian' if the core of the arrangement is the concentration of scientific attention on building up the independent economic life of the emerging State, rather than on predation on neighbouring States.

The scientific and technological communities exist in the form of organisations, associations, institutions etc to which people adhere for the purpose of interaction with their peers, accreditation, information, contacts and so on.

If these exist, as autonomous entities, over a geographical area which is a candidate for recognition as a national State, then the scientific community may to that extent be considered 'national-minded'. It would then be in a position to organise itself over that geographical area, as a branch of an international or European institution. It is possible to talk about a 'national scientific community' with a conscious existence.

If such a situation exists, for each branch of science and technology, and if the organisations concerned are in a position to get together in the formulation of policy proposals, then we have a healthy situation, and the Government (or the national movement, in a pre-State situation) would have to listen.

This situation has never existed for Ireland, since the State was founded. There had been the basis for its existence for a period under the British, when the RDS was in Leinster House, close to the Academy in Dawson St. There were however two channels (divide et impera!): the Academy dealt with the Treasury, like the Royal Society and the RS of Edinburgh, and the RDS dealt with the Department of Science and Arts in Kensington. There was some exchange of ideas between the Academy channel and the Home Rule movement, for a period, but virtually none in the period leading up to 1916. This is an important contributing factor to the current lack of appreciation of science in Irish culture.

Fitzgerald and Stoney(19) in the 1880s tried to unify the organisational structure, on the basis of a single Royal Society of Dublin, in which Academy members would have had Fellow status, and from which the old RDS agricultural interests would have been shed. This failed because Kane and the then Home Rule Academy leadership valued the status of the direct link with the Treasury and objected to being under the DSA(32).

The Irish State could have pulled this together, but it didn't. The Academy now deals with the Dept of Education, and the RDS is on its own, surviving on the income from the show-ground and exhibition halls.

In the Irish Republic now the only unified body is the Institution of Engineers of Ireland, which unites all engineering disciplines, and has successfully lobbied the Government for an Act defining the status of Chartered Engineer. The scientific community however is divided, some being Irish-based and some being London-oriented.

For a brief period in the 1960s the present writer acted as the secretary of a body which attempted to draw together the scientific and engineering interests to produce a policy document, in the aftermath of the OECD Report, proposing how the State should set up structures in response. This was not successful; the NSC was set up as an appointed body, State centralist paternalism reigns, and the democratic process is in abeyance.

It would be of interest to analyse the scientific institutional structures in other emerging nation-states in terms of the Baconian model, and the extent to which they relate primarily to the central imperial structures for which they were designed.

It will also be interesting to see what comes out of the South African transformation. There are many parallels with the Irish experience.

Notes and References

2. The Petty plan for Ireland involved the replacement of people by livestock, by a conscious political process.

3. John Joly FRS, geologist and physicist, was active from the 1890s to the 1920s in Trinity College Dublin; first physicist to come up with a realistic estimate of the age of the earth, based on radioactive decay processes; discoverer of the element samarium; inventor of a colour photographic process; was actively involved in the defence of TCD during the 1916 Rising.

4. Higgins' course in industrial chemistry in the RDS was internationally famous; Kirwan in Dublin was in contact with Lavoisier in France and promoted the new chemistry, while Priestly in England was still supporting the phlogiston theory of combustion.

5. Gellner E; Nations and Nationalism; Blackwell 1983.

6. Olby RC et al eds; Companion to the History of Science; Routledge 1990

7. The influence on Bernal of his Irish roots is the subject of papers by Ann Synge and the present author in the Royal Society Notes and Records, 46(2) and 47(1), 1992/1993.

8. Scientists are likely to be familiar with most if not all of the names mentioned. For non-scientists wishing to understand their significance, a beginning can be made by referring to a work such as Chambers Concise Dictionary of Scientists, which gives a few hundred words to each.

9. Inkster Ian; Science and Technology in History: an Approach to Industrial Development; Macmillan 1991.

10. Few scientists are aware of Tyndall's Irish background; few Irish people are aware of Tyndall's international standing, which is comparable to that of Shaw or Joyce in literature. For a treatment of this important Irish scientific figure, see John Tyndall: Essays on a Natural Philosopher, W H Brock, N D McMillan and R C Mollan, RDS 1981.

11. G F Fitzgerald (the Trinity physicist best-known for the 'Fitzgerald Contraction' as the explanation for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment, which led directly to Einstein's Special Relativity) and the Trinity elite of that generation were Irish to the extent that they fought their corner in the British institutions and looked after Irish interests. It shows up in their correspondence; they nominated each other for key positions, and displayed an Irish flair for politics and committee intrigue. They wanted Trinity to be a centre of excellence in its own right, and not a second-class Cambridge. They could without much difficulty have been wooed into a Home Rule position if the Rome Rule bogey could have been laid.

11 contd. An important factor in the reinforcement of the Rome Rule image undoubtedly was the episode of Cardinal Cullen and the 'Godless Colleges', which deprived Catholics of university education for 2 generation, and fuelled the sectarian demand for a 'Catholic University', instead of the more democratic demand for a laicised national university system including Trinity. Fitzgerald's response to this was to promote technical education in Dublin, and the Dublin Institute of Technology counts him among their founding fathers. He was also a supporter of the demand for access by women to university education, which was blocked by the Trinity Board, but achieved in the context of the Royal University. He was therefore firmly in the liberal tradition, and the Home Rule movement, had it succeeded under Parnell, would have needed to take him on board in the interests of gaining international credibility. The analysis of the voluminous Fitzgerald papers from the point of view of the politics of science in the Ireland of the 1890s remains to be done; this I understand is currently in progress, with Denis Weaire in the TCD Physics Dept, Charles Mollan and others.

12. cf McMillan N, Regional Technical College, Carlow.

13. Bernhard C G et al eds; Science, Technology and Society in the Time of Alfred Nobel; Pergamon/Nobel Foundation 1982; collected papers presented at the 52nd Nobel Symposium at Bjorkboen, August 1981.

14. Crawford E; Nationalism and Internationalism in Science, 1880-1939; Cambridge 1992.

15. in Bernhard et al, ibid; J L Heilbron, Office for History of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, USA.

16. Ben-David J; The Scientist's Role in Society; A Comparative Study; Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971.

17. de Candolle A, Histoire des Sciences et des Savants depuis 2 siecles; Geneva 1885; Paris 1987.

18. The task that needs to be done is to go through all the papers, see who was publishing what, where and why. I have begun to do this, but it is a substantial task, needing the time of a professional historian with insight into the role of science, and there are not many of them around.

19. G F Fitzgerald and his uncle G J Stoney were a formidable duo who dominated the RDS in the 1880s and 1890s. Fitzgerald is best known for his contribution to the understanding of the velocity of light in relativity theory; he came up with the 'Fitzgerald-Lorenz contraction' as the explanation of the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment on 'ether drift'. The path from this led directly to Einstein. Stoney was first to name the concept of the 'electron', which J J Thompson went on later to discover in Cambridge. Both were FRSs. The RDS in those days was awash with FRSs.

20. McClelland and the Nolan brothers established a school of physical research dedicated to condensation nuclei in the atmosphere, which endures to this day; The published in the Academy, in the 1910s, at a time when the RDS was solidly imperial in its interests, thus in a sense reclaiming the Academy as a national focus, and picking up the Kane tradition. This school has persisted and is currently booming thanks to the increased international interest in the environment.

21. Hackett F E; the Photometry of N-rays; Sci Trans RDS Vol 8, p127-138. This work was subsequently exposed as fraudulent by R W Wood in Johns Hopkins in the USA. This may be regarded as an example of the 'cold fusion' type of phenomenon.

22. Stoney to Fitzgerald, Jan 5 1896: 'The more I see of London societies, and London and Cambridge men, the more firmly I am convinced of the impolicy of trying to get the decision of whether papers shall be published into their exclusive hands...and the...great impolicy of not vigorously supporting...the RDS and the RIA...'. cf Fitzgerald papers, RDS.

23. ETS Walton received the Nobel Prize in 1952 along with Cockroft for their work in Cambridge in the early 30s on basic nuclear physics.

24. C O'Ceallaigh led a team (which included the present writer) in the DIAS in the 1950s which collaborated with various European laboratories on pioneering work in high-energy nuclear physics, in which unstable sub-nuclear particles (mesons and hyperons) were identified and characterised, using innovative techniques developed in Dublin.

25. Joe Lee: Ireland 1912-1985, Politics and Society; Cambridge 1989; cf p 638, where the author draws attention to the fact that '..historians have scarcely begun to grapple with the role of science and scientists, much less technology and technologists, in Irish experience. We sadly lack, in particular, sustained historical enquiry into the engineering professions..' In this context he references Dorinda Outram (UCC), G Herries Davies (TCD) and the present writer in the Crane Bag 7. 2, 1983.

26. Pyenson L; Science and Imperialism; in Olby et al ibid.

27. de Martonne E; Le Savant Colonial; Paris 1930.

28. Science and Irish Economic Development; OECD 1964; the authors were Professor Patrick Lynch of UCD Economics Dept and H M S (Dusty) Miller, an English engineer who then headed the R&D department of Bord na Mona the peat development board. Both authors acknowledge positively the influence of J D Bernal FRS, whose classic 1939 book 'The Social Function of Science' played a seminal and productive role in science policy analysis, from a consciously Marxist angle. The Bernalist model was influential in the USSR and Eastern Europe. In the over-emphasis on the top-down role of the central State the Bernal model was however flawed, and science policy in Ireland shows signs of this parentage. This is another avenue to explore.

29. Nandy A ed; Science Hegemony and Violence; UNU Tokyo; OUP Delhi; 1988.

30. Coakley D; Irish masters of medicine; Town House, Dublin 1992.

31. Porter N; Fuel-wood, a Crisis in the Making; Studies Vol 82 no 327, Autumn 1993.

32. The details of the politics of this epoch needs elaboration. Fitzgerald's motivation was primarily the development of a unified scientific lobby, to get things done. He went on to promote technical education in Dublin, and is counted among the founding fathers of the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999