Galway Science & Technology Festival 2025, Part 1: School Tours

We at the Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics at the University of Galway were pleased to deliver a packed programme of activities for this year’s Galway Science & Technology Festival.

Happily returning to work after some time out due to a health issue, I helped coordinate busloads of children and teenagers from schools in visiting the Data Science Centre to experience coding workshops and the hands-on fun environment of the computer and communications museum. The secondary school student visitors also benefited from presentations delivered by our researchers highlighting their work which is mapped against the United Nations’ 17 Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) as well as the delights of interactive sessions in our Virtual Reality Lab.

Such was the demand from schools in Mayo, Galway city and county that we had to put on extra visits after the festival ended!

We also collaborated with TCD and the UoG School of Computer Science to deliver a series of Pytch coding workshops at the Galway Science and Technology Festival Exhibition Day as well as with Róisín Birch and the team at the University of Galway Access Centre in our ongoing support for the critical DEIS schools based Uni4U initiative.

So a big thank you/Míle buíochas to the Insight volunteers who mentored and presented on their research, provided coding or VR workshops or guided tours of the computer & communications museum, namely Abdul Wahid, Carlos Tighe, Duc-Duy Nguyen, Janakkumar Kapuriya, Katarzyna Stasiewicz, Kashif Shaheed, Hoang Long, Prateek Paul, Simanta Sarkar, Tomas Grigas and Zeeshan Malik.

 

Margaretta D'Arcy- feminist, Irish republican, internationalist, socialist, artist, environmentalist, anti-war activist, anti-imperialist campaigner.

 

So many warm loving tributes have been paid by so many people to the great and unique Margaretta D'Arcy over the last week that I agree wholeheartedly with.

The last time I met this iconic inspirational woman was a few weeks ago at one of the weekly Thursday 'Campus Anti-Genocide' protests she regularly took part in which were held to highlight the University of Galway's unacceptable refusal to cut its research links with the Haifa-based Technion university that has strong links to the Israeli military industrial complex.

The first time I met her was in the late 1970s when I was a student union activist impressed by her and her late husband John Arden as they promoted the British "7:84" left wing political theatre group to the students of what was then the University College Galway (UCG). The group's name came from the fact that 7% of the population of Britain owned 84% of the country's wealth. She was then and always remained a fiery passionate left-wing idealist who stayed true to her radical beliefs.

Over the decades she was always on the front line standing up against oppression and for justice both in Ireland and elsewhere.

Galway and the world will be poorer for her departure.