TG4

I have been attending a conference for the past week at the National University of Ireland in Galway on the west coast of Ireland, and it has been very enjoyable. I was originally down to present a conference paper as usual, but on this occasion the conference organiser, Mary Cawley, asked me also to deliver a keynote address. I accepted the invitation and gave a version of my soon-to-be-published article on the relevance of quantum mechanics to the social sciences. Despite the threatening title, my presentation was well received.

The conference was about sustainable rural systems and contained several field excursions. One was to the TG4 television station at Baile na hAbhann west of Galway, which was part of a high technology film and creative arts cluster in what seemed the most unlikely place in a remote part of Connemara. The station transmits only in Gaelic!! Indeed, it's the only such station in the world: see http://www.tg4.ie/ie/index.html . More incredible still was the fact that it was a complete TV station. It actually made programs - documentaries, news, sports, etc.; did all of its own graphics; imported content from overseas and edited it; had the full panoply of cameras, studios, announcers, and technical bods, ran extensive libraries of video materials, and so on. Moreover, we saw the lot without any hindrance. It was one of the most interesting 2 hours of my life.

We couldn't get in to the film studio across the road because, we were told, there were two leading film stars producing a movie! I envisioned Brad Pitt or Hugh Grant in the building, but then I thought that unlikely

AS