Ireland and CERN
Not long ago I posted an item about Ireland’s potential membership of CERN. There seems to have been some progress at political levels in this direction. In Mid-December, the Seanad called for a detailed proposal for CERN membership to be drawn up. More recently still, Minister Simon Harris has indicated that he will bring such a proposal to Cabinet on the matter.
There’s an article in yesterday’s Irish Times by Cormac O’Raifeartaigh reviewing the situation.
As I understand things, if the Irish Government were to decide to take Ireland into CERN then it would first have to become an Associate Member, which would cost around €1.5 million per year. That’s a modest contribution, and the financial returns to Irish industry and universities are likely to far exceed that. This Associate member stage would last up to 5 years, and then to acquire full membership a joining fee of around €16.8 million would have to be paid, though that could be spread out over ten years, along with an annual contribution of around €13.5m.
While I support the idea of Ireland joining CERN I feel obliged to stress my concerns. The most important of these is that there seems to me to be a real danger that the Government would simply appropriate funding for CERN membership from within existing programmes leaving even less for other forms of scientific research. In order to reap the scientific reward of CERN membership the Government will have to invest the additional resources needed to exploit the access to facilities membership would provide. Without a related increase in research grant funding for basic science, the opportunity to raise the level of scientific activity in Ireland would be lost and science overall may end up worse off.
Ireland recently joined the European Southern Observatory (ESO), a decision which gave Irish astronomers access to some amazing telescopes. However, there is no sign at all of Irish funding agencies responding to this opportunity by increasing funding for academic time, postdocs and graduate students needed to do the actual science. In one respect ESO is very like CERN: the facilities do not themselves do the science. We need people to do that. CERN membership could turn out to be like a very expensive Christmas gift that looks very exciting until you open the box and find that the batteries are not included.
P.S. At least Cormac’s employers in Waterford have been quick off the mark in exploiting the potential of CERN by renaming their entire institution after it…
In the Dark 
December 30, 2022 at 2:22 pm
Yes, I saw that hilarious copy-editor’s typo.
Re funding, I agree with much of the above. However, with a new director in charge of SFI, I’m hopeful that we will see a new era of funding for basic research. There is no question that the funding of scientific research in Ireland has been heavily skewed towards applied science in recent decades, hopefully we are looking at the start of a more enlightened approach
December 30, 2022 at 11:07 pm
Congrats for this.
This is an important discussion to have and you are not always thanked for insisting on the discussion -politicians often like big infrastructure investments more than doing things that actually have real value, and any effort like this will have local stakeholders who often actively resist any sort of meaningful analysis once they feel that they have built momentum around their particular baby.
Sometimes the best is genuinely the enemy of the good — you may not get an optimal strategy but often/usually get good enough. But this can pinch particularly hard in a small country, IMO, since big places are more likely to have a more diversified portfolio.
But big infrastructure decisions will drive other spending decisions for years to come — and if there isn’t funding for people in at the outset, paying for those people will risk leaching support for activity in other areas.
On top of which, buying into CERN right now is a lottery ticket – if it turns out to shed light on “new physics” (either via actual particle discoveries or precision measurements) over the next decade or two it will pay off, but if it doesn’t (and this might very well be the case) it will become an increasingly large millstone around the neck of the field, and accelerator physics could become more like a ritual than discovery science if we remain in the “worst case scenario” where the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing else.
December 31, 2022 at 10:59 am
Agree with all your points. No point in spending millions of euros on international facilities if you then don’t provide the funding for the scientists in your country to exploit those facilities. (The same applies to national facilities).