Tom’s missionary zeal for the wonders of science

City Lives – Denise McNamara meets Tom Hyland, Chairman of Galway Science & Technology Festival

When we meet for coffee one rainy Wednesday afternoon, Tom Hyland has just arrived back from the funeral of a former county councillor in Gort.

He is in a reflective mood.

The Chairman of Galway Science & Technology Festival tells a number of anecdotes about the late auctioneer whom he had known since his long tenure in the IDA.

When we turn to the task in hand, Tom lays his cards immediately on the table. He does not want any focus on him, rather just the festival.

He could talk all day long about the festival, he insists, which he has been chairman of almost since it was set up. But he would prefer if there was only a cursory mention of him in what has been explained is a long profile piece.

It is certainly surprising that Tom Hyland would be a shrinking violet.

Afterall, he was Mr IDA in Galway for many years, hobnobbing at launches with Taoisigh and Ministers, on first name terms with some of the biggest names in the business and corporate world in the west and a regular feature in newspapers in an era when factories and companies were opening and expanding at a rapid rate.

On leaving the IDA in 2001 to pursue a private consultancy business, it was his connections to the business world that were paramount to his being appointed head of the Galway Science & Technology Festival by the then Minister for Science, Technology and Commerce, Noel Treacy.  

A native of Lismore, Co Waterford, Tom first began work with IDA Ireland in February 1974. He moved to Galway when he was appointed assistant manager of the IDA Galway Industrial Estate in Mervue where he remained for four years.

He spent two years in the south east before being appointed regional manager for the west region in 1980. He went on to become director for the west, northwest and midlands region.

It was a very busy time for the state agency as it launched an aggressive strategy to attract foreign multinationals to Ireland in the recession-era 80s and through the early Celtic Tiger years. He was at the helm when some big names were lured west of the Shannon.

Saville Systems, CR Bard, which became Medtronic, Nellcor Puritan Bennett, which became Corvidien, Boston Scientific, Transitions Optical in Tuam and Nortel, which has since morphed into Avaya, were making moves under his watch.

He describes them as “interesting and exciting times”.

“My job  and the team I worked with was to market Galway and the west of Ireland and elsewhere to incoming international companies. At the time we were also responsible for marketing the indigenous industry before it was decided to divide the IDA and set up Enterprise Ireland to help Irish companies grow and expand,” he explains.

It made sense locally to separate the two, he recalls.

“The cluster of industries such as the medical devices sector that is being grown and developed over the past 30 years has resulted in a whole series of specialist sub suppliers which have gone on to become international supplies in their own right,” he explains.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.