`It was a sorry story … now we can think in terms of planning’: The OECD Dimension of Irish Education & Science Policy Innovation, 1958-68 (NIRSA) Working Paper Series. No. 31

Unsuccessful domestic attempts to raise the profile of science and technology in Irish policy debate can be traced back to the end of the 1940s. By the late 1950s a combination of Soviet space race achievement and Irish development strategy shift had created a more receptive environment internationally and nationally. Interaction with the Office for Scientific and Technical Personnel (OSTP) of the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) ended the isolation of the Irish Department of Education and the Second Programme for Economic Expansion did what OEEC experts had been urging Irish policymakers to do by integrating education into economic planning. Both in the education field and that of science and technology the bridge between a general commitment to planning and a concrete programme of action was supplied by research studies. These studies were initiated in the early 1960s by the successor body to OEEC, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). They were carried out by multi-disciplinary Irish teams with a common core membership and produced the seminal Investment in Education and Science and Irish Economic Development reports. The former legitimated a quickening pace of government action to increase access to an expanded and rationalised education system strongly reoriented in the direction of science and technology. In the case of the latter, however, a context of alliance between Finance and Education was replaced by one of struggle for control between the two departments, both of which were participating in OECD initiatives to promote the adoption of national science policies. Also relevant was a division between the science and technology interests of the education sector and those of research institutes like Institute for Industrial Research and Standards, whose sponsoring department, Industry and Commerce, backed the attachment of the National Science Council to Finance