`You name any industry and plastic is used in it," says Patricia Ryan, the look of a zealot in her eye. "That's the thing about plastic, people just don't realise where it's used." Take nylon, she argues - "today it's used for gearing huge pieces of equipment."

With a quick glance around her office for confirmation, she says that plastic is all around us. In the Irish Ropes factory next door, for example, where she worked until recently, "it's all plastic . . . all the rope, all the twine, all the strapping. They're just 100 per cent plastic."

Ryan is a rarity. She's a polymer engineer. On top of that, she is often the only woman working in a predominantly male world. "You go to a conference and you will definitely be unusual. You might have two or three women in a group of 80 men."

There was some disbelief among her friends when she expressed her intention back in the mid-Eighties of pursuing a career in plastics. "People thought I was doing plastic surgery," she says. "Polymer engineering was unheard of at that stage."

With the shrewd know-how that comes from being the youngest member in a family of siblings who have already "gone into the working world," she studied the jobs pages in the newspapers each week to see "the industries that were up and coming" and quickly narrowed the field down to "plastics and computers."

Because she had "a hankering for science even in Inter Cert" and because she had always liked physics and chemistry and biology, she decided to study polymer technology at Athlone RTC. After finishing the Leaving Cert in 1985 at the Sacred Heart School in Tullamore, Co Offaly, Ryan started the four-year BSc course 30 miles away in Athlone. There were 19 in the class in first year, including six girls.

"As I was going through I found that there were aspects of it that I didn't like - I wasn't too keen on lab work. You could take a job that would be purely polymer chemistry which would be just R&D but I love the industry aspect of it.

"First year was quite enjoyable and not that tough. People who didn't have honours maths had to work that bit harder. They were bringing people up to a standard in first year. Then it just got tougher. But, because the class was so small, you had great rapport with your lecturers."

Ryan did her work experience in third year with Bayer, the chemical giant based in Germany. "I loved it," she says. "It was so hands-on. It was being out where real people have real problems and these are day-to-day problems. There was no such thing as making the answer fit what the lecturer wanted."

After graduation with an honours degree, she went to Abbott Ireland based in Sligo, which made cathether devices. "That was Abbott's main product at the time. I was there for about a year-and-ahalf. In Abbott you are actually working on a product that went to market. There's an enormous sense of satisfaction to see it going into manufacture from the design stage."

In November 1990, she moved to Irish Ropes in Newbridge, Co Kildare, as quality manager. Then in 1992 she was offered a job at a sister company, Sealcon, as technical and quality manager.

"Irish Ropes and Sealcon are on the same site but we do completely different products," she explains. Sealcon produces packaging for the food industry, in particular a number of butterspread companies. "It was a very big change. It's a very different process that we use here."

With the steady hum of big machines in the background, Ryan is happy, working in a world that she loves. "That's the beauty of it," she says. "No two days are the same."

Of course, she'd love to see more women working in the business - "but I have to say that the guys treat you as an equal. The problem is that it's difficult to get young people to go into the industry."