A team of five transitionyear students from St Ailbhe's School in Tipperary, for example, managed to build a miniature Formula One car. Their carbon dioxide powered vehicle, Blade Of Fire, took first prize at the F1 in Schools Technology Competition in Dublin earlier this month.

The St Ailbhe's team took on all-comers and impressed judges with a detailed presentation of how they arrived at their design and the scientific process involved.

"We were in on Sundays and after school, " said Pat Noonan, a member of the victorious team. The six-week project was "time-consuming but very well worth it, " according to his colleague Stephanie Tracey.

Alongside their three teammates, they collaborated on design, worked out the optimum car shape using a computer-aided design (CAD) package, trialled their model in a virtual wind tunnel, tweaked it to perfection and had it manufactured to their specifications. "We always thought engineering would be hard but the software was easy to use, " Tracey said.

The enthusiastic noises from the St Ailbhe's team will have been music to the ears of the event's organisers, the Irish Computer Society.

Backed by car manufacturer Honda, the ICS put together the first F1 in Schools event to take place in the Republic to promote science and technology in Irish schools.

Employers are, literally, crying out for graduates with IT and engineering qualifications, even as the number of Irish students electing to pursue those disciplines is declining.

A shortage of programmers, software engineers and other IT professionals is leading many technology companies to cast their nets outside Ireland, at greater expense, in order to fill vacancies.

"We're just not seeing the level of graduates coming through to be able to provide the pool of resources necessary, " said Michele Quinn, director of the Irish Software Association (ISA). Irish software companies were finding a shortage of suitably skilled employees "across a wide spectrum of functions, " she said.

Apart from the delay in filling vacancies and the expense of having to recruit outside Ireland, where necessary, this skills shortage has implications in the longer term.

Quinn said one of the ISA's ambitions is to see Irish software companies grow in scale and to build genuinely global companies from Ireland. "We do that through having a pool of graduates and capable companies, " she said.

Without a readily available pool of talent, that is difficult.

It also raises the question as to where the next generation of Irish technology entrepreneurs will come from.

It's not just indigenous firms having trouble finding talent, either: even the large multinational employers in the country are finding it difficult. "I guess the story has been consistent for the last few years, " said Fiona Mullen, human resources manager for Microsoft Ireland. "There are definitely gaps in the market place, and where we would see it is in the niche areas."

Mullen said the declining numbers of students electing to take up engineering was also an issue. "That's definitely a concern for us."

Government bodies such as the IDA and Enterprise Ireland have pushed the vision of a "knowledge economy". Creating high-skilled, "value-added" jobs has been a priority for both bodies, with the Ireland of low-cost labour an increasingly distant memory.

Some of the companies contributing to this knowledge economy are starting to worry about the future, however. Aengus McClean, vice president of AOL Technologies in Dublin, said the company had achieved considerable success in attracting IT projects to Ireland in the past, expanding its workforce in the process. Much of the development work on AOL's search engine and its new online personal finance service was carried out at its Citywest office. But it is becoming noticeably more difficult to recruit staff with the expertise to handle such projects, he added AOL has been able to recruit skilled engineers from outside Ireland, from Poland in particular. In the longer term, McClean said, it is important that universities closer to home produce more talent.

"It's a concern for us and it's a concern for the economy in general, " said Marie Moynihan, a human resources director with Dell. She said the company found it especially difficult to source staff with technical expertise and language skills, who are much sought after for in Dell's technical support division, providing support to corporate customers.

Google, a relative newcomer to Ireland, has recently begun recruiting software developers for its Dublin office. The company initially set up sales and support functions in Ireland but has also begun to carry out development work.

Rian Liebenberg, Google's information systems director for Europe, said it is looking to grow that side of its Irish business but is under no illusions about the difficulty in finding the right people. "Of course our preference is to hire locally, but we end up having to look to other European markets to supplement the shortage of skills".

Liebenberg said, however, that Google finds it equally difficult to recruit technical staff elsewhere. "There are always challenges and concerns in finding top quality talent on the engineering side, but it's a problem we face virtually everywhere in the world, " he said.

Part of the problem in Ireland, according to Liebenberg, is that technology companies have not done a good enough job of promoting their industry and of selling impressionable young students on a future career in IT.

"I think there is a lack of awareness that organisations like Google actually hire software engineers in places like Dublin, " he said.

Microsoft's Fiona Mullen said it is clear that the industry needs to do address that lack of awareness. "We all have a combined interest, because we have to sustain ourselves in this market place and we'll only do that if we can recruit locally, " she said.

Who knows, the first port of call might be the budding engineers at St Ailbhe's.

A WAKE-UP CALL TO INDUSTRY THE number of IT and engineering graduates required to maintain current growth levels in sectors such as construction, pharmaceuticals and software development greatly exceeds the number of people signing up for such courses, according to a report produced by Engineers Ireland.

Knowledge Island 2020, compiled by a think-tank of Irish engineers, calculates that Irish universities would need to produce 14,000 engineers and 6,900 IT graduates per year to meet the demand, and to establish Ireland as a "top "ve global economy by 2020".

At present the country is only producing 5,100 engineers and 2,500 IT graduates. "A considerable marketing job needs to be done, and I think the industry is slowly waking up to that, " said Kevin Kernan, director general of Engineers Ireland.

"The messages we're getting are that clearly there is a shortage. It's very dif"cult to "ll vacancies that employers have, especially in electronic and electrical engineering, " he said.

Like the Irish Computer Society, Engineers Ireland is trying to "nd ways to interest younger children in pursuing careers in these areas."We're now focusing a lot of our efforts on the late primary school and secondary schools, the 10 to 12 year olds. They know very little about what engineers do, " said Kernan.

"To a large extent, maybe in years gone by we were not terribly creative in presenting the exciting opportunities that a career in engineering can present, " he added.