It’s a commonly held belief in these parts that West Cork, despite being a tad on the remote side, has something to offer no matter what your interests are. take Oliver, 13. Rocket-fuelled by a summer-holiday diet of old space movies—2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Planet of the Apes and so on—he’s given up earlier plans to become a pirate and now intends to be an astronaut.
We’re taking his ambition seriously, partly because he reads and understands books with titles such as Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity and partly because he’s started to teach himself Russian, compulsory for members of the International space station, and is already saying things such as: (What is an astronaut’s favourite place on a computer?’ the answer being, of course, or ‘the space bar’).
You might well assume that there would be nothing available locally for a budding astronaut, but you would be wrong. In the little fishing village of schull (population 693), there is to be found Ireland’s only planetarium. tucked at the back of the school, it was donated to the community in 1989, for reasons that are not entirely clear, by a German industrialist.
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