As Minister for Natural Resources, I had the honour of giving the opening speech at the Irish Geoscience Early Career Symposium iGEO2020 at NUI Galway today.
This is an important two-day event aimed at developing capacity in Ireland for all the geoscience sectors.
A report by Indecon International Economic Consultants put a value of €3.277 billion on the overall economic impact of the sectoral outputs in 2016 across the areas of geotourism and geoheritage, groundwater, extractive industries, geoscience research and geohazards.
The report also calculated the number of people directly and indirectly employed across the sectors as 24,739.
I was delighted to support iGEO2020 which aims to provide early career geoscientists with an opportunity to collaborate and benefit from the multidisciplinary nature of research, to take part in cutting edge scientific debate and to exchange knowledge with one another as well as industry members and policy makers.
There is a great necessity to develop Ireland’s economy on a broad and sustainable basis and it is essential for us to foster and develop the next generation of geoscientists.