A pharmaceutical company in Shannon, UCB Schwarz Pharma has announced today that it is to invest €7,000,000 in R+D. The company currently employs 215 people. This is the latest in a series of outstanding results for Irish science and engineering. My feeling is that we have really outperformed in this area of creating and innovating. We seem to be attracting inward investment in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries that is fundamentally different to the manufacturing interest we used to get.

When IBM located 100 researchers to its Mulhuddart plant a year ago, it didn’t get much coverage. However, I have visited IBM research headquarters in Yorktown Heights in Upstate New York, and at that time IBM had no intention of relocating any research outside of the US. They weren’t going to do it no matter what, they said.

A couple of years later and the IDA and Ireland got them to change a fundamental aspect of their ethos.

The news this morning is brilliant. Research is linked to intellectual property (IP) and IP is linked to new technology and new technologies change the way in which the world works.

So, today is a good, if not great day for Irish Science.