Is It Time For Ireland To Give Nuclear Power A Chance?
Friday 17 January at Blackrock Castle Observatory
This is an interactive talk and audience members are asked to bring their smartphone to share their thoughts.
About the Speaker: Dr Paul Deane is a research scientist in clean energy futures at UCC. He is also a fellow at the Colorado School of Mines and in 2018 was the Royal Irish Academy speaker on computer science.
His research helps us understand the choices involved in delivering clean, affordable energy to all.
He has co-authored over 100 technical papers in diverse areas such as electricity production, farming and agriculture, natural gas futures, energy access and international aviation. His research has been published in Nature, Joule and he is a regular contributor to print, television and social media in Ireland.
The talk will begin at 8.00pm on Friday 17th January. It is free to attend, and we welcome anyone with an interest in the topic to come along on the night. For directions to Blackrock Castle, see our Skeptics In The Castle information page.
Taking Arms Against the Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Pseudoscience
Thursday 28 November at Blackrock Castle Observatory
5th generation mobile networks are coming in for increasing criticism by otherwise reputable sources and commentators. They have been demonised as mind-control, as using ‘untested, weapons-grade, ultra-high frequency technology’ and purported to cause severe harm to the population just by existing.
Are they a back-door for governments to manage their population through technology? Are we simply leaving ourselves open to other countries infiltrating our national infrastructure? Are there real dangers to this new technology?
Sean Slater of Edinburgh Skeptics will try to address these fears head-on and clarify what 5G is and what it is not.
About the Speaker: Sean has worked in the mobile phone business for over 25 years and has seen 2G, 3G, 4G and now 5G being rolled out by several different networks. He is also the vice-chair of Edinburgh Skeptics and as such has taken an interest in the pseudoscience surrounding his industry.
The talk will begin at 8.00pm on Thursday 28th November. It is free to attend, and we welcome anyone with an interest in the topic to come along on the night. For directions to Blackrock Castle, see our Skeptics In The Castle information page.
If you’re worried about the hordes of killer spiders invading our shores, or the swarms of seagulls reigning death from above, this talk is for you. Science Communicator, Rob O’ Sullivan, separates the fact from the fiction and shows you how to do the same.
About the Speaker: Rob O’Sullivan is an Irish Zoologist turned Space Nerd.
He knows far too much about animal sex, and nowhere near enough about Space. Rob has received glowing recognition for his Science Communication work including an award of a SMASH Fellowship and getting called a pervert by Phill Jupitus.
You can find Rob by day pottering around CIT Blackrock Castle Observatory, and after dark on Twitter @Rob0Sullivan.
Please note: Due to the nature of this talk, some sections may not be suitable for a younger audience.
The talk will begin at 8.00pm on Thursday 27th June. It is free to attend, and we welcome anyone with an interest in the topic to come along on the night. For directions to Blackrock Castle, see our Skeptics In The Castle information page.
8:00pm • Friday 3rd August • Blackrock Castle Observatory
John Duignan (born 1963) grew up in both Stirling in Scotland and in Carrigaline County Cork. He had a difficult and troubled childhood thanks in part to a mentally ill father, an ill and abused mother and the chaotic home life that resulted.
Following the untimely death of his parents in 1974, he and his siblings were fostered by family members on his mother’s side in both County Cork and Wicklow. He left school at the age of 17 and joined an American Christian Evangelical drama group and spent three years traveling Europe and North America forwarding this unique brand of Christian ministry. In 1983, he was operating a branch of this ministry in Vancouver Canada and came to see that much of the Christian message simply did not add up. He moved to Halifax Nova Scotia to live with a group of atheist humanists and to work on an old North German built schooner. About a year later, he found himself in Stuttgart, Germany and during a period of dark depression was recruited by The Church of Scientology.
In 2008 he wrote and published The Complex: An Insider Exposes the Covert World of the Church of Scientology. In this non-fiction book he describes his 22 years in the organization and his eventual awaking partly as a result of attending an event where actor and Scientologist Tom Cruise was given the award of “Most Dedicated Follower”. Duignan began to examine the organization more closely and had doubts about remaining. He left the organization in 2006, after taking measures to avoid investigation by Scientology’s intelligence agency the Office of Special Affairs.
The Church of Scientology responded to the publication of The Complex by sending legal letters to several bookstore retailers that were selling the book, claiming the book contains libelous statements about a member of the organization. His publisher Merlin Publishing, “emphatically denied” these allegations, and an editorial director at the publishing company called Scientology’s claim “vexatious”. The United Kingdom branch of Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, stopped selling copies of the book after receiving legal letters from the Church of Scientology through internationally feared libel firm, Carter Ruck; booksellers Waterstone’s and W H Smith and Borders Books were “warned off” selling the book as well. However the book remained in broad publication here in Ireland and has been stocked in all Irish retailers for a number of years.
Following the publishing of The Complex, John returned to education completing a BA in English and Italian Literature and Italian language at University College Cork.
John counts Christopher Hitchens, Bertrand Russell and A.S. Byatt among his most important intellectual influences. He no longer considers himself to be a religious person.
This talk takes place at Blackrock Castle Observatory, Cork at 8:00pm on Friday 3rd August. Admission is free and all are welcome to attend!
Dr David Robert Grimes presents Conspiracy Theories in the 21st Century
8:00pm • Friday 22nd June • Blackrock Castle Observatory
Conspiratorial ideation (e.g., the moon landings were faked; climate-change is a hoax; vaccination is dangerous) is the tendency of individuals to believe that events and power relations are secretly manipulated by certain clandestine groups and organizations. Public acceptance of these ostensibly explanatory conjectures remains high, even when they are non-falsifiable, lacking in evidence, or demonstrably false.
To exacerbate the problem, social media provides fertile ground for conspiracy theories to rapidly propagate, and dedicated echo-chambers can insulate these beliefs from critical examination.
In this talk, we’ll examine what makes conspiracy theories so virile, including recent mathematical models that aim to understand the viability of such beliefs, and models of how they spread. And we’ll see how much damage such claims can cause, and why in our hyper-connected era its more imperative than ever before to combat false narratives.
About The Speaker: Dr David Robert Grimes is a physicist and cancer researcher, currently based at the Queens University Belfast and a visiting researcher at University of Oxford. His research focuses chiefly on the application of radiotherapy physics, and oxygen modelling, and academic work on factors influencing public perception and understanding of science.
He is also a science writer and frequently contributes to the Guardian, Irish Times and BBC on a wide spectrum of science, society and philosophical topics. He was joint recipient of the 2014 Nature / Sense about Science Maddox Prize for Standing Up for Science.
About the Speaker: Sean has worked in the mobile phone business for over 25 years and has seen 2G, 3G, 4G and now 5G being rolled out by several different networks. He is also the vice-chair of 
About the Speaker: Rob O’Sullivan is an Irish Zoologist turned Space Nerd.
ish and Italian Literature and Italian language at University College Cork.
About The Speaker: Dr David Robert Grimes is a physicist and cancer researcher, currently based at the Queens University Belfast and a visiting researcher at University of Oxford. His research focuses chiefly on the application of radiotherapy physics, and oxygen modelling, and academic work on factors influencing public perception and understanding of science.
Cork Skeptics 