Best of Irish celebrated: No frontier to achievements

In a darkening world, depressingly beset by violence, it was heartening yesterday to celebrate two spectacular events which reflect the best of everything Irish — the 141st Dublin Horse Show and the astonishingly successful rendezvous between a comet and Rosetta, a European built space probe following its ten year, 6.4bn-kilometre journey around the solar system.

Though separated both by time and space, each event has an inherent capacity to inspire the imagination.

Ireland has strong links with the probe. An active member of the European Space Agency since 1975, its role in the project ranges from financial support to Irish scientists studying the impossibly named 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, a giant snowball circling the sun since the dawn of the solar system. Moreover, parts of the craft were built by Irish companies from our little-known space-technology sector.