Sir, – Now that the dust has finally settled on the ESOF/Dublin City of Science jamboree, and everybody is basking in the warm afterglow of its success, perhaps it might be appropriate to draw your attention to the Little Book of Irish Science that Science Foundation Ireland put together to mark the occasion.
The booklet is compact, clever and attractive, and the foreword states: “From ancient astronomy to modern genetics, Irish scientists and engineers have been leaving their mark on the world”. Nothing wrong with that, but what is one to make of the fact that the coverage hops from Newgrange (c. 3000 BC?) to Robert Boyle (d. 1691) – with nothing in between? Did our saints and scholars contribute nothing at all to the study of science during the medieval centuries? We’re well used to hearing about the Dark Ages (usually c. 500 years, not 5,000!), but this is a bit much, particularly in light of the International Conference on the Science of Computus, which took place here in Galway in mid-July – the fourth time (since 2006) we’ve hosted such a gathering!
These conferences have highlighted, inter alia, the extraordinary importance of Irish scientific scholarship in the Early Middle Ages, and no less an authority than the Very Short Introduction to the History of Time (Oxford 2005) has stated: “In the 7th century the leading experts on the computus were the Irish” (computus being the mathematics required to calculate the date of Easter). That SFI ignored this year’s Galway event is bad enough; that it should equally disdain the published evidence of more than a century of scholarship, thereby consigning medieval Irish scientific achievements to a black hole of oblivion, is inexcusable. Surely it is not too much to expect the premier Irish science funding agency to give credit where credit is due to earlier achievements in Irish science! – Yours, etc,