The Ardnacrusha hydroelectric scheme in Shannon was a groundbreaking project by any standards, writes Mary Mulvihill.
It was an heroic act of nation-building. The infant Free State government, fresh from a bitter Civil War, began in 1925 what was arguably the State's most ambitious project ever: diverting the mighty Shannon, building a massive hydroelectricity station at Ardnacrusha, and replacing the myriad of local power stations with a national grid.
But not everyone approved: the project would consume 20 per cent of the national budget (final cost: €5.8 million), and generate more electricity than the country knew how to use - there would be so much current that a London newspaper, the Morning Post, feared Irish people "may all be electrocuted in their beds".
To add to the lunacy, the project was proposed by a young pup of an engineer, and the monumental scale meant outside help was needed, in the form of German electrical firm, Siemens.
Amid strong anti-German feeling, Eamon de Valera denounced the Shannon Scheme as a white elephant. He preferred a smaller scheme on the Liffey near Dublin, which could be handled by an all-Irish team. Afterwards, if a bigger power station were ever needed, the Irish could then build that themselves.
Yet when Ardnacrusha officially opened in 1929, more or less on time and on budget, it was heralded internationally as a triumph. It paved the way for rural electrification, gave other developing nations the confidence to attempt similar schemes, revitalised Germany's international industry, and was the making of Siemens.
And in 2002 Ardnacrusha won two major international honours: the Landmark Award, ranks the Shannon scheme with the Eiffel Tower; and the Milestone Award, recognising the world standards which Ardnacrusha set, puts it alongside Japan's bullet train.
The Shannon, Ireland's largest river, rises in County Cavan at the Shannon Pot. Its gentle gradient - in the 200 kilometres to Killaloe it drops a mere 17 metres - renders it almost useless for power, apart from the final 25 kilometres to Limerick, where it falls 30 metres. Not surprisingly, there had long been proposals to harness that head of water.
In 1844 the Irish chemist, Sir Robert Kane, calculated, in his important book The Industrial Resources of Ireland, that the Shannon at Limerick was worth 34,000 horsepower. Kane's calculation was forgotten in the darkness of the Famine years, and interest revived only at the end of the 19th century with the development of hydroelectricity, when several Shannon schemes were suggested.
By the early 1920s electricity consumption in Ireland was running at nearly 50 megawatt (MW), 75 per cent of which was used in Dublin.
There were over 300 small electricity producers around the State, mostly hydro-powered and generating direct current, which could be transmitted only a few hundred metres.
Demand for electricity was rapidly growing, however, and the new Free State government began to consider a large hydroelectricity station. The "grand old man of Irish engineering", Sir John Purser Griffith, proposed a Liffey scheme with a reservoir at Blessington and power station at Poulaphouca. This would be easy to build, be close to the main electricity market in Dublin, and the reservoir could double as a water supply for the city.
Meanwhile, Thomas McLaughlin, a young engineer from Drogheda, looked to the Shannon. His 85MW scheme would generate more electricity than the country consumed, entail major building work, and was far from Dublin (though as power distribution systems improved, this became less of an issue). Many believed it would bankrupt the new State, and naturalists worried that the works would be an environmental disaster.
McLaughlin, who had lectured for a time at UCG, worked in Berlin in the early 1920s with the Siemens-Schuckert engineering firm. He persuaded Siemens to examine his proposal, but more significantly, he convinced the Minister for Industry and Commerce, Patrick McGilligan, of the merits of the Shannon scheme. Work began in August 1925.
It was a huge undertaking, employing over 5,000 people at its peak. To avoid flooding Limerick city with discharge waters, the station was built upstream, at Ardnacrusha. Water was diverted to it from the main river, via a dam and intake weir at Parteen, and channelled to the power station down a new 13-kilometre head-race canal that was dug out by bucket excavators.
A dam, power station and turbine hall were built at Ardnacrusha; and a two-kilometre tail-race canal was blasted through the rock to take the outflow back to the river. Two rivers had to be diverted, and two navigation locks built, plus four new bridges where the intake canal cut across roads. The chief engineer was Frank Rishworth, a former colleague of McLaughlin's at UCG, who had worked on Egypt's Aswan Dam.
The logistics were mind-boggling: a temporary power station was needed to power the various workshops and an electric crane. Siemens also installed 100 kilometres of narrow gauge railway, with some 100 locomotives and 3,000 wagons to move the massive amounts of clay and rock which were excavated. Three large rock crushing plants macerated the excavated rock so it could be re-used as hard-core.
At a time of high unemployment, the construction jobs at Ardnacrusha were a boon, and men walked for days to join this Irish Klondyke. Thomas McLaughlin, who was in charge of the operation, ensured Irish people were recruited whenever possible in preference to Germans.
Conditions were harsh, however, and a bitter strike over pay delayed operations for three months. Many of the 5,000 workers were accommodated in temporary camps. Inevitably, there were accidents, and by 1927, there had been 12 fatalities. Racial tension led to the death of one German foreman, for which former worker John Cox was hanged in 1929.
The ESB established what was one of the world's first national grid systems, and set about winning customers: opening showrooms for domestic appliances, arranging demonstrations, and supporting the Irish Women's Electrical Association, to promote electricity in the home.
In July 1929, President W.T. Cosgrave officially opened the Parteen sluice gates. The intake canal began filling, and generation started two months later. Today, Ardnacrusha accounts for 1.5 per cent of consumption, but in the early 1930s it produced 96 per cent of the State's electricity needs, facilitating social, economic and industrial development programmes.
To mark Ardnacrusha's 75th year, the ESB, Siemens, Hunt Museum and University of Limerick have organised a conference and an exhibition of Limerick-born Sean Keating's contemporary paintings documenting the work in progress.
The exhibition opens with a talk by Keating's son, Justin Keating, and a performance of a new composition by Micheál Ó Suilleabhaín commissioned by the ESB.
Keating's best-known Ardnacrusha painting is the heavily symbolic Night's Candles Are Burnt Out. Here, the artist and his young family look optimistically to the new construction work; a priest, his candle burning down, is marginalised; a businessman takes centre stage, dismissing the lone gunman; and a skeleton hangs forlorn from a pylon.
For Keating, this was "the dim candle light of surviving medievalism . . . fading before the rising sun of scientific progress", and "the dawn of a new Ireland, and the death of the stage Irish man".
The wide-ranging conference includes talks on Ardnacrusha's history, architecture and engineering, security considerations and social consequences, and even literary references: Dr Joachim Fischer of UL's Centre for Irish-German Studies will discuss Denis Johnston's 1930s play, The Moon in the Yellow River, and a novel by little-known German writer Reinhold Zickel, published in 1940 as Strom (meaning electricity or stream), and re-published in 1953 as Am Shannon [on the Shannon].
The conference concludes with Fritz Lang's classic 1926 movie, Metropolis, made as Ardnacrusha was being built,and a ballad session featuring songs about the Shannon scheme.
Mary Mulvihill is the author of Ingenious Ireland, a book on Ireland's scientific and industrial heritage
Ardnacrusha 75
• Limerick Hunt Museum, Sean Keating exhibition, April 7th-23rd:
Night's Candles Are Burnt Out (right), lecture by Patricia Cusack, University of Birmingham, Wednesday, April 7th, 7 p.m.
• Sean Keating: his life and work, lecture by Andy McCarthy, Tuesday, April 20th, 1 p.m.
• The conference (April 15th-17th) takes place at various venues in Limerick and Ardnacrusha. For further details see: www.ul.ie, www.huntmuseum.com, or contact joachim.fischer@ul.ie (space will be limited at most events).
• A good history of Ardnacrusha can be found in The Shannon Scheme and the Electrification of the Irish Free State, edited by Andy Bielenberg (Lilliput 2002).