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Irish Marine Institute Opens New HQ
01 Sep 2006
The Irish Marine Institute's new headquarters at Oranmore, Galway Bay have been formally opened by Prime Minister Bertie Ahern. Housing a majority of the Institute's 200-strong staff, the 50m, 11,000m 2building features 54 scientific laboratories, a crescent-shaped office facility and a 150-seat auditorium specially designed for both national and international conferences.
The new headquarters will also be a focal point for implementation of Sea Change, a project forming part of the Irish Government's new national science plan for 2007-2013 due to be announced shortly.
This aims to apply science, research and innovation to a series of initiatives covering renewable energies from wave and tidal power as well as commercial applications of environmental monitoring technology.
An internationally-established science organisation, the Institute maintains two research vessels as well as a research facility in Co Mayo and regional port affiliations. Together with the Geological Survey of Ireland, it has also been actively engaged in the six-year Irish National Seabed Survey (INSS) project, one of the world's largest hydrographic undertakings of recent times, involving mapping an offshore area ten times larger than Ireland itself.
To date, the 32m INSS project has realised over 300 paper-based charts of Irish continental marine areas and a total of 5.5 terabytes of digital information stored on a database.
The project is now continuing under a new guise, Integrated Mapping for the Sustainable Development of Ireland's Marine Resource, or INFOMAR.
This is essentially concerned with mapping of commercially valuable inshore areas, beginning with selection of 26 priority bays and three coastal sectors.
