NOBEL LAUREATE Séamus Heaney and former president Mary Robinson are among a high-powered committee of 18 patrons backing a bid for Dublin to become the European City of Science in 2012.
The campaign will cost €250,000 and, if successful, a further €5 million to €6 million to host the EuroScience Open Forum (Esof), of which the Government will contribute half.
The bid, also involving industry and academia, is the brainchild of Government chief scientific adviser Prof Patrick Cunningham whose long-term goal is that Ireland would be responsible for 1 per cent of the knowledge creation in the world.
"It's an ambitious target," he said yesterday at a formal announcement of the bid in Dublin's Mansion House. But becoming the city of science would be a platform on which to build that strategy.
He expressed quiet but restrained optimism that the bid would be successful.
"We have got very good feedback, but we have to be wary because people are always nice to you," he remarked.
"It's a bit like bidding for the Olympics, only without the brown envelopes."
Vienna is the only other confirmed applicant thus far, before the end of September deadline, but Copenhagen, which lost out to Turin to host the bi-annual expo in 2010, has also expressed an interest.
If successful, the organisers hope to host an 8,000-delegate conference in July 2012 at the convention centre under construction at Dublin Docklands, and to have 50,000 visitors at its exhibition to showcase Irish scientific research and knowledge, with interactive demonstrations of the latest developments.
While the campaign has the slogan "Dublin: City of Science and Ireland: Island of Enterprise", the organisers want it to have a very international flavour.
The "committee of patrons" includes the UK's science adviser John Beddington; president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Jim McCarthy; chairman of BP and Goldman Sachs International Peter Sutherland; and a number of Nobel Prize winners for science, leading international activists and science journalists.
Ms Robinson agreed to chair the committee of patrons - with one stipulation: that there be an emphasis on women in science.
Aidan Gilligan, senior executive with the Esof bid, said this wide involvement would showcase the event as global "rather than just an Irish gig in Dublin".
Minister of State for Science, Technology and Innovation Dr Jimmy Devins said there would be a huge return, through showcasing Irish research and development.
He said it would also encourage further investment and jobs, as well as encourage other scientific organisations to hold their events in Ireland.
Dublin's lord mayor Eibhlin Byrne, who hosted the Mansion House launch, pointed out that 2012 would be the 80th anniversary of Ernest Walton's "groundbreaking discovery which won him the Nobel Prize for physics".
It would be a "wonderfully fitting way to celebrate the achievement of Ireland's only Nobel-winning scientist", she said.
