Do you remember a Weather Eye last December about an initiative called the Irish Marine Data Buoy Network? It told the story of the launching of a weather buoy in the Atlantic 50 miles to the west of the Aran Islands, a project which marked the beginning of a joint venture between four agencies co-operating across the Irish Sea: Met Eireann, our own Department of the Marine, the British Meteorological Office, and a fourth entity with which some readers may be less familiar - the Irish Marine Institute.
MI-1, as the weather buoy was called, is still going strong. Every hour it transmits, via satellite for the use of forecasters in Ireland, Britain and other parts of Europe, reports of wind speed and direction, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, the height of the waves and the temperature of the sea and air.
And the Marine Institute is going strong as well. As you might guess the institute concerns itself with virtually every facet of what Oliver St John Gogarty called the "lapsing unsoilable whispering sea". Our maritime resources encompass some 900,000 square kilometres of sea and ocean, around 220 million acres, or more than 10 times the land area of the island itself. It is a vast resource, contributing great quantities of food for export and for use at home, providing enviable amenities translatable into large earnings in terms of leisure pursuits and tourism, and comprising a large reservoir of untapped energy.
Much of the potential of this resource remains unrealised, and our capacity to avail of it depends to a large extent on our ability to develop and apply new technologies. And this is where the Marine Institute comes in. It was established in 1994 as the State agency responsible for co-ordinating marine research and development, aimed in turn at exploiting the territorial waters around our coast. The institute has a staff of 130 people at four locations around the State, and it operates the marine research vessel Celtic Voyager from which, as it happens, the weather buoy recalled above was launched.
Yvonne Shields is director of the Marine Institute's marine science technology and innovation division. This evening at 8 p.m. in Theatre G32 of the UCD Earlsfort Terrace complex she will give a talk to the Irish Meteorological Society entitled "Oceans of Opportunity", which will outline the mission, the day-to-day work, and the future ambitions of the Marine Institute. Admission is free to anyone who cares to go along; as the Meteorological Society likes to put it in its brochures: "All are welcome, so why not bring a friend!"