Reasons to be proud of being Irish: James Joyce's Ulysses; four Nobel prizes for literature; the monks who "saved" Western civilisation during the Dark Ages; a rich musical tradition; not to mention Mary Robinson, the Irish soccer squad, U2 and Riverdance, writes Mary Mulvihill
We added to the list in the "tiger" 1990s, when we realised this nation of artists and athletes could also produce entrepreneurs and Ryanair, Elan and others gave us new heroes.
They should not have come as a surprise: we are as good at inventing gadgets as we are at inventing stories. And we have discovered eternal truths, as well as written about them. It's just that, sadly, not many people know about our creative scientific heritage.
It was an Irishman, John Tyndall, who first explained why the sky is blue. And Irish people who gave the world the hypodermic needle, the first commercial submarine, even the first guided missile; in 1845, Birr Castle, Co Offaly, could boast the Hubble telescope of its day, to mention but a few of our contributions. We were as entrepreneurial in the 1800s as in the 1990s, except that emigration took our entrepreneurs overseas.
Streets in Paris are named after Irish scientists (check out Rue D'Arcy, for instance), yet Irish scientists are scarcely known here. And some think our science began and ended with the Newgrange astronomers 5,000 years ago.
Hopefully, Hamilton Year will change that. Sir William Rowan Hamilton's bicentenary (he was born in Dublin in 1805) coincides with International Physics Year, marking Einstein's 1905 publication of special relativity. So whereas last year all was Joyce and Ulysses, this year, science takes centre stage.
2005 is also the centenary of Sinn Féin. How appropriate that as we reflect on our national identity and a century of nation-building, we are also embracing our scientific heritage.
Strangely, one person who successfully bridged our artistic and scientific cultures was Éamon de Valera, who left Sinn Féin in 1926 to start Fianna Fáil. In 1939 this maths teacher-turned-taoiseach established the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS), with two schools, Celtic studies and theoretical physics, the latter modelled on Princeton's Institute of Advanced Studies, where Einstein worked. Today, DIAS scientists have a tremendous world reputation (www.dias.ie), yet are unknown here.
It is all part of science's low profile. For over a century, Ireland embraced the arts but turned its back on the creativity that is scientific endeavour. Contrast this with France, for example, where they even have a phrase for la culture scientifique.
Some say we spurned science because historically our scientists and engineers were mostly Protestant planters or Anglo-Irish elite. True, even in the late 1800s only 10 per cent of Irish scientists were Catholic. Some even suggested the native Irish were downright unscientific: George Francis FitzGerald, a noted Trinity College Dublin physicist, thought that Catholics' beliefs prevented them "from rational activity almost as much as the fetid worship of an African savage".
But I don't buy it: Italy and France prove that you can be both Catholic and scientific. And many of our great writers were Anglo-Irish, yet we never disowned them.
Others argued that it was because England kept the natives uneducated. Or because Irish nationalism was ruled by romantic, anti-science poets. Or because science and engineering were seen as part of the colonial "project" here, part of mapping and exploiting the country's resources.
For what it's worth, I believe it was partly because Catholics had neither opportunity nor encouragement. (For the same reason, there were also few women scientists then.) Because to be a scientist you need access to libraries, laboratories, colleagues and ideas, funding and a university education. And for centuries, these were beyond the reach of most Irish Catholics.
Ireland gained its first university, Trinity College Dublin, only in 1592, nearly 400 years after most European countries. And it was built to educate Protestant clergy, a restriction only lifted in 1793, after the French Revolution, amid fears that Catholics forced to Europe for their education would acquire revolutionary ideas.
The Catholic hierarchy did not help: it resolutely opposed TCD, and until 1970 Catholics needed a bishop's dispensation to study there.
Had a "Dublin University" been established centuries earlier, Irish history would have been different. We would have had an established Catholic educational system, and contact with the Renaissance, a movement that largely passed Ireland by. We might now have streets named after Hamilton and Tyndall. And more respect and affection for our scientists.
The other big factor, I believe, was neutrality. In military countries such as the US and UK, typically 50 per cent of the science budget goes on military research, huge sums of money that put science high on their political agenda.
But, arguably, science has arrived on our political agenda: Science Foundation Ireland is now spending over €500 million on research; and our first ever Cabinet committee on science has its inaugural meeting today, when it will also launch Hamilton Year.
And who was William Rowan Hamilton? A wonderfully creative mathematician, who threw out the old rules of algebra and made important contributions to physics. Physicists know his hamiltonian, which is crucial to quantum mechanics, and his quaternion algebra (describing rotations in space) is today used in computer graphics and to control the orientation of spacecraft.
He himself modestly hoped his work would earn respect for Ireland and "remove the prejudice which supposes Irish men to be incapable of perseverance". The organisers of this year's Hamilton fest would surely agree.
Mary Mulvihill is author of Ingenious Ireland, an award-winning book on Ireland's scientific heritage.
Hamilton Year is co-ordinated by the RIA; for details of events see www.hamilton2005.ie