The warm glow doesn't pay the bills, though, and 46-year-old Killian is still trying to find a backer for his bicycle, which has front and rear steering. He won a silver medal at the British Invention Show in November, but that didn't translate into investors.

Killian, a software engineer by profession, reckons it would take 10,000 to get the bicycle into production. "I'm talking to people all the time, but they come and go, " he says. "I'm hoping to have it built in China and sell in Ireland, Germany and Holland."

Killian was Ireland's sole representative in Geneva. The Irish invention scene is, it seems, in a state of chassis. Every month for a year, Cork inventor Nichola Field organised a monthly inventors' clinic in the Invent Centre in DCU. Field is both the inventor of a child-resistant container and founder of the Inventors Association of Ireland, a network of about 350 inventors. The club applied unsuccessfully for grants, and the clinic petered out in January.

"The government doesn't see the point of looking after inventors, " Field complains. "The Welsh put in a couple of million pounds a year to fund exhibitions, clinics and training days. They get the funding, we get patronising looks."

Ron Immink, operations manager of DCU Invent Centre, believes there is an over-emphasis in Ireland on technology entrepreneurs. "Inventors don't fit this . . .

they have an image problem. Look at the UK, where some of the inventions are phenomenal . . . the anti-gravity pump, talking labels."

On the bright side, Irish universities are generating impressive invention activity.

Immink cites current work on sensors that float in the human body, sense when someone is about to get a heart attack and phone the hospital "by the time you clutch your heart". Another inventor is working on a "James Bond-style" textile that becomes invisible.

But Immink calls for innovation to be promoted "not only in universities but in inventors". He tried to set up a virtual company scheme, but says it was underresourced. He is hoping to restart something in DCU with renowned British inventor Trevor Bailiff as figurehead.

And if he ran the country? "I would give inventors a home to go to, and start communicating that inventing is not weird and wacky."

Inventors need support, Field agrees.

"Something like 98% of inventors are dyslexic. About 60%-70% of the inventors I deal with never got a qualification at school, because academics were a turnoff." At the least, she says, it would be good to get inventors onto Enterprise Ireland's database.

Fermoy-based inventor Tony Allen would like to see a government-led invention coordinator. "It costs money, but it's important for the economy, and it's important for the future. The guy pushing the wheelbarrow can come up with as good an idea as the brain surgeon, but isn't as well equipped to do something about it."

Allen won a gold medal in Geneva in 2000 for his invention, a spidercatcher that can trap a spider without injuring it.

The joke in his house, he says, is that his wife can never leave him because he owes her too much. Allen got 10,000 funding from Enterprise Ireland towards patents, but has spent about 400,000.

"When you patent your idea, you get a provisional licence for 12 months and then you have to nominate all the other countries you want your product patented in, " he says. "Everyone sees it as a hobby, but it is so bloody expensive it has to become a business."

Eighteen months ago, Allen brought in AJ Keating of Keatings Bread as an investor. His target this year is to turn over 400,000, up from 100,000 last year. He has given up his business designing shopfronts, sealed a slew of distribution agreements for the spidercatcher, and is cracking retailers. Marks & Spencer, for example, is talking about branding the spidercatcher under its own name.

"I was always a bit of an inventor, " Allen says. "I was the kid at the breakfast table who'd fight for the empty cornflakes box.

Eventually, one of my pals said 'Tony, would you ever shut up and go and do something about it".

Travelling to a Geneva fair also paid off for Killarney plumber-turned-inventor Tim Cremin, who five years ago invented his 'Oxyvent' tank to take air out of the water in heating systems and solve a problem he says everyone recognised.

"Everyone was running from the problem.

I made a stand and said I'm sick of running."

Cremin made a prototype, and at Geneva, as part of a delegation organised by Field, he encountered the Dutch company that now manufactures the tank. He guarantees it will cut underfloor heating costs by 50% and overall heating costs by 30%. "People think I'm bluffing. It's so simple, it's hard to understand."

Forty-year-old Cremin has been reluctant to take in investors. "After building something, you want to hold onto it as long as you can, and the longer you hold on the more it'll be worth." He tried to get Enterprise Ireland support, but "failed miserably", he says.

Michael Sharp, head of intellectual property at EI, defends the agency's approach to inventors. He accepts that Ireland has traditionally had fewer patents filed than other, similar economies. EI's door is open, he says, but it cannot provide funding without vetting individual inventions. EI does provide advice, as well as financial support for promising patents, he points out. "If you are talking about state funding, you provide it on the basis that the state has assessed the project and believes it has a chance of success."

Immink doesn't pretend every invention he sees is of astounding quality. "The laws of nature say perpetual motion is impossible, but we get about three a year saying they have invented perpetual motion."

That is not the point, he says. "We are missing out because inventors, particularly in Ireland, are seen as complete loopers. Some are a bit eccentric, but that's part of the make-up. We need to try to find and capture them."