What can Ireland teach us about community investment and future economic sustainability?
This could be an interesting case study - while 36m euro’s might not be a large amount of capital on an American scale, this move to buck austerity may give us a model to research efficacy of local capital infusion projects.
Athlone is important as an Irish center for new industry, notable for its research and production for medical advances such as the nicotine patch and time release medication, and is the most densely populated region of Ireland.
In front of several hundred invited guests on Monday, Taoiseach Enda Kenny officially opened the latest addition to the AIT campus - an impressive €36 million Engineering and Informatics building.
He said engineering students knew the importance of structure and support which must change and flex with time before aptly summing up the importance of the opening with a quote from poet John O’Donoghue: “We shape our buildings and then let them shape us”.
“As an academic community, we listen closely to what they are saying about their needs, responding to the requirements for particular skills, such as the need for graduates in cloud computing and network management, for polymer technologists for the medical device industry, for environmental engineering scientists, for green technologists. The fruits of this deep and sustained conversation is an industry-academy engagement that produces real world-informed teaching and learning, and top calibre graduates.”The world was changing rapidly and in a decade there would be further advances in robotics, cloud computing, data storage, the internet, genetics, all of these areas were going to grow, he said citing cloud computing in particular, as an area in which there would be major investment over the next 10 to 15 years, and AIT with the new facilities would be ideally placed to take advantage.
Speaking directly to the students lining the upstairs part of the entrance hall looking down on him, the Taoiseach told them they were going to carry the responsibility and reputation of the country forward in their chosen field, stressing that their education was comparable to the best the world could offer.
He went further in praising engineering as a vehicle of economic growth:
“Engineers are the people at the front line who always see the evolution of the product. That’s what has been a major asset to the German economy to where they are… Engineers are people who do see potential for innovation, change, research, commercialisation and so on and that’s where the future lies,” he highlighted.
It’s the start for a whole new future, not just for AIT but for the country, the Taoiseach concluded positively. “I want to by 2016 prove this is the best country in the world in which to do business and you are part of that.”