SNIPPET: A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, KANE became the President of Queens College Cork on its foundation in 1846. He was President of the Royal Irish Academy (1877). His 'The Industrial Resources of Ireland' (1844) offered a highly optimistic assessment of the prospects for Irish development, widely cited by later proponents of economic nationalism. He established a Museum of Irish Industry (1847), and was one of the three-man scientific commission established in October 1845 to find a cure for potato blight. KANE was more than just a 'token Catholic'; he was a figure of European stature who had come up despite the Protestant monopoly of higher education. The Queens Colleges in Cork, Galway and Belfast were however condemned by Cardinal CULLEN, and the Catholic establishment held out for a 'Catholic University'. This blocked access to higher education for the rising Catholic middle class for two generations, until the NUI was set up in 1906. The effect of this on the development of access to core-European scientific and technological culture in the Irish national context was devastating. It resulted in the virtual confinement of scientific culture into a Protestant colonial ghetto, though before the 1900s occasional Catholics filtered in, mostly via education abroad.