Irish Catholics and nationalists practiced and promoted science during the nineteenth century, yet science did not become integral to Irish national identity. This fact was both reflected in and influenced by the role which science played in Irish print culture. The abortive project to issue a history of Irish natural philosophers, mooted by Daniel Owen Madden and intended to form part of the ‘Library of Ireland’, shows how easily science was sidelined from national narratives. The ‘Library of Ireland’ was published by the Catholic publishing house James Duffy and was identified with the nationalist Young Ireland movement. Madden claimed his book would be ‘an attractive, readable, popular, and most useful volume’ which would offer biographies of past philosophers such as Kirwan and Molyneaux, but add modern philosophers such as Robert Kane. The book was never published and the ‘Library of Ireland’, once completed, consisted almost exclusively of history and literature. The exclusion of science from narratives of Irish identity extended beyond a single popular book series as this chapter will demonstrate. One nationalist later recalled that there was no Irish school of scientific thought, despite many outstanding individuals. This chapter tries to understand why, if science was prevalent in Irish life, it was absent from Irish self-definition.

Previous chapters have demonstrated that science was an integral part of efforts to reform Irish education and society. Yet science did not serve a similar function in one of the most pervasive reform movements of the century – that to re-form Ireland as an independent nation. There appears to have been a disconnect between Irish scientific reformers and wider Irish culture. As Madden's failure to have men of science included in the ‘Library of Ireland’ shows, it was difficult to identify an Irish scientific tradition or to link scientific reform with nationalist aims.