Ireland is not a peripheral island on the edge of Europe, but a potential bio-economic superpower, a keynote speaker at the recent Atlantic Summit in Galway has said.
Prof John Bell said that realisation of a successful bio-economic hub would involve Galway and Cork working together as a“Silicon valley of the sea”.
In practical terms, this would see Galway’s Marine Institute and two third level institutions (University of Galway and ATU) working in a cluster with UCC’s MaREI, he told RTE Radio 1 Countrywide presenter Philip Boucher-Hayes.
However, a contrasting vision was espoused on the same programme by surfer, writer and academic Dr Easkey Britton, who was also a speaker at last week’s Atlantic Summit.
Prof Bell, now with UCD’s school of international relations and formerly with the European Commission, explained in the radio interview that Ireland thinks of itself as an agricultural and IT economy.
“The idea that we are principally an island…a large ocean state…that means something now,”he said.
“It means you are potentially a bioeconomic superpower,” he told Boucher-Hayes.
The blue bioeconomy is already happening in Iceland where there is more money being made from the waste products of fish than from the fish, and they are making high value added products such as cosmetics, he said.
“This is prompting a regeneration of declining communities,”he said.
“The role of science is to give courage to politics, hope to people ,respite to nature, and space to innovation,” Bell said.
Even with “the huge problems with the planet”, we have agency as “we understand the problems” and “we can apply the science in a rules based way”.
Marine social scientist, writer and surfer Dr Easkey Britton said we need to redefine our relationship with the ocean.
The phrase “blue bioeconomy” suggests viewing the ocean as a “place of extraction”, but it is “much more than that”, she said,
The ocean is not a “GDP line or a set of data points”, but the source of all life itself.
The language we use around it and the framing are really important, she said.
“Of course there are huge opportunities” but also “massive tensions”, she said.
“If it is business as usual and we treat it in the same way that we managed things on land, that didn’t go very well for us,”she said.
“So there’s a huge opportunity now to think about how we do this differently..”
Listen to RTE Radio 1 Countrywide’s full marine special programme here
