Sir, – Your laudatory article about the Ardnacrusha Shannon scheme (Home New, July 27th)forces me to put the real facts before a wider public.
While the scheme has long since paid for itself several times over, it was badly planned from its conception and cost the government of the day far more than it should have done.
Like the British Ground Nuts scheme in Kenya and Khrushchev’s disastrous cotton growing efforts in the Aral Sea region, the Shannon Scheme was not adequately researched before being undertaken. Like them, it was politically motivated. In this case it was designed to show that the new Irish government could do more than paint the pillar boxes green.
No proper hydrographic survey was undertaken and the planners did not realise that a large proportion of the rainfall in the Shannon basin seeped away through the porous limestone of the region.
The result was that everything, from the head race to the dam, was built on a massive scale which was not warranted by the flow of water that actually passed through Ardnacrusha. Initially, three turbines were installed, instead of the six originally planned. By dint of reducing the flow through the Shannon River even further, another was installed later. The output of electricity, while perfectly adequate for the demand at the time, was not what had been planned. – Yours, etc,