In a 1999 survey of attitudes toward biotechnology across the European Union, just 16% of Irish respondents indicated they were optimistic about the impacts of biotechnology. Eight years earlier, before there was much debate about the applications of biotechnology, the optimism 'score' in Ireland was 68%.

This makes a Cabinet meeting that took place in early 2000 all the more remarkable. In a break from precedent, Mary Harney, then Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, secured invitations for two people from outside the public service to address government ministers. The two, president and deputy president of the Irish Council for Science Technology and Innovation (ICSTI) presented the outcome of the technology foresight process that ICSTI had just completed, arguing the case for investment of state funds in scientific research on a scale never before imagined.

They proposed that a new body be established to allocate dramatically increased research funds to biotechnology, and information and communications technologies. Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) was established later that year and began its disbursements in 2001.

The disparity between the political decision to invest and the public's lack of confidence in biotechnology represents a paradox in the Irish 'turn to science': It has taken place without a concomitant turn in public culture.

In his foreword to the first White Paper on Science and Technology in 1996, the minister declared the government's aim "to build an innovative economy and society which are founded on a competence in, and a comfort with, modern scientific and technological developments."

The concern about public 'comfort' lay behind the establishment of a public awareness program that has been running since then. The annual budget for that program, Discover Science and Engineering, has increased 1,000% over the past decade. Its activities are strongly focused on school students, with the aim of increasing the take-up of science studies at the graduate level. But, over the past decade, the proportion of students completing high school education and entering science programs at the graduate level has continued to fall, though it shows some signs of bottoming out.

Public science activities aimed at the broader adult population have increased significantly in number and diversity, yet there have also been examples of retreat from public engagement. Reflecting the bruising debates of the late 1990s over genetically modified (GM) foods and crops, the ICSTI Technology Foresight report called for a "national conversation" on applications of biotechnology. The talking hardly started, and the Web site set up to facilitate it (www.biotechinfo.ie) closed quietly after a couple of years.

Surveys of the population as a whole give evidence repeatedly of the anomalous relationship between public funds investment and public awareness. In a 2006 survey undertaken for a report I cowrote on nanotechnology, 38% of respondents had heard of but knew nothing about biotechnology; 19% said they had never heard of biotechnology.

A 2007 European survey on biodiversity put Ireland 25th of 27 EU member states in the positive responses to a question on being well informed or very well informed on that subject; Ireland was second among the states in 'not at all informed' responses.

This pattern has been confirmed over 15 years of European surveys on biotechnology; in 2005, only Lithuania and Malta reported lower aggregate familiarity with GM foods, gene therapy, nanotechnology, and pharmacogenetics, and only Slovenia showed a lower level of support for these same four applications.

The publication on April 23, 2008, of an Opinion from the Irish Council for Bioethics on stem cell research prompted public debate and media coverage. As a decade ago with GM foods, the controversy put a contemporary science topic on political and public agendas, boosting awareness of the relevant scientific and ethical issues. But the challenge of developing a public science culture in which such topics are accommodated with 'comfort' remains substantially to be addressed by Irish society, and by the media, educational, and political systems.

Brian Trench is coordinator of the Masters in Science Communication at Dublin City University, and coeditor, with M. Bucchi, of Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology (Routledge 2008).