CERN Summer School. Over the years, several Irish third-level students have been privileged to attend the CERN summer school that runs for three months and provides lectures and research experience to about 300 international students. Irish participation has generally only been possible through philanthropic contributions to the developing-nation fund. It has had an important impact on the participants careers such as:
James Keaveney (now a lecturer at the University of Cape Town),
Aoibhinn ní Shúilleabháin (broadcaster and Assistant Professor at UCD),
Kevin Maguire (Software enginner and data analyst at Aire Logic)
Alice Lynch (Senior Data Scientist at Zalando). She writes this about her experience.
James Casey (Principal program manager at Microsoft. See this article he wrote about CERN for journal.ie )
CERN teacher programme. Thanks to sponsorship from local businesses, Galway teachers have been able to attend the CERN teacher's conference. Read about their experiences from the Connacht tribune, and the impact this has had on their teaching in the classroom. One of the attendees, Ealanor Nolan, subsequently shared her experiences with the physics teacher's conference at NUI Galway in 2015, showing other teachers how they might bring what's happening at CERN directly into the classroom.
CERN internships. Eleven TU Dublin Year 3 students have undertaken internships in research groups with CERN involvement, including some who have travelled to CERN for testbeam experiments.
CERN masterclasses. Each year hundred of secondary school students get to spend a day as a research scientists at one of the universities in Ireland (e.g. Maynooth) and conclude their experience via a video conference with their peers in other countries. Some reports of their experiences are here and here.
Secondary school visits from Ireland can be arranged to view CERN and the Large Hadron Collider. Read reports from some Irish schools (Coláiste Éinde Galway, Yeats College, Holy Child Killiney, Sandford Park.) In the days before Zoom, it was news in 2003 when 200 Irish students visited CERN (virtually)! More recently (2013), Alexandra college organised a virtual visit for 600 primary and secondary school students.
Working at CERN. Many people, after an undergraduate education in Ireland, have benefitted from education and training at CERN, often by taking a post-graduate degree abroad, since access through Ireland is limited. There are also several people currently working in Ireland for whom CERN played a formative role.