Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,
Cork Independent, 9 January 2014
“Technical Memories (Part 66) – A Model of French Industry”
Before Christmas, the column noted that the courses of the Crawford Municipal Technical Institute responded to industrial needs in the late 1940s and 1950s. Driven by the aspirations of the Marshall Aid fund, the Interparty government invested part of this money in technological projects. The Cork area witnessed a number of projects, the first of which was the Lee Hydro Electric Scheme.
The Lee Scheme was 40 kilometres in length and over 22 kilometres wide. This was a colossal task, and necessitated years of minute planning, geographical surveys and preservation orders on. Detailed land acquisition records and newspaper documentation afford a fascinating glimpse into what must have been an enormous upheaval for the 200 families involved, many of whom relocated elsewhere as the valley was flooded and their homes were submerged. The archives of the ESB, which include documents and photographs from the time of construction, show the original valley and the processes of construction and transformation. There was significant interaction with the natural world of the Lee valley. At low water levels in the reservoirs, the ghostly remnants of a farming community can be viewed including ruinous houses, collapsed stone walls, half standing bridges, roads leading to the edge of the reservoirs, gate pillars, tree trunks and even the ruins of a paper mill.
The Lee hydroelectric scheme was to significantly change the face of mid Cork on a regional scale, creating new cultural and physical landscapes. The success of the enterprise depended on the effective deployment of manpower (650 personnel, many of them highly trained or skilled), both from home and abroad. The sheer scale of the project required a sophisticated infrastructure of housing, lodging, catering and entertainment as workers were drafted in from not only the Cork region but from all over Europe. The Lee Hydroelectric Scheme transformed the Lee valley by opening up new tourism opportunities for fishing, waterskiing, sailing and rowing, and by securing the future supply of clean and economical electricity and water throughout the Cork area and beyond.
In general the Lee Hydroelectric Scheme came twenty years after the start of the Irish Free State’s hydroelectric schemes on the River Shannon. The Irish schemes aimed to address the ever-growing need to provide an improved level of electricity service for existing customers, as well as the new demands created by an ambitious national programme for rural electrification.
An excellent book entitled, Ireland, Design and Visual Culture, Negotiating Modernity, 1922-1992 by editors Linda King and Elaine Sisson has a chapter by Sorcha O’Brien on technological progress in the Irish Free State. In the 1920s, the then government placed a huge level of focus on technology, specifically electrical technology. The harnessing of ideas of technology was a physical demonstration of the government’s nation-building efforts. It showed as Sorcha O’Brien notes “their political, legislative and organisational agenda, part of an ongoing ideological re-imagining of Irish national identity”. This was localised for the citizens of Ireland and found expression in local and national sites and objects plus patterns of engagement with such sites as hydroelectric schemes. With the Shannon Scheme it was decided to break away from British technical ideas and to use German approaches. German technology was seen as an agent of nation state building and as a model to create as Ms O’Brien argues the “Irish national interpretation of modernity”. Ardnacrusha is a typical example of German industrial building techniques in the interwar period. It is known for its pitched vernacular structures as well as the latest glazing techniques and steel frames as well as its qualities of progressiveness and construction.
Daniel Morrissey TD was appointed to the Irish Government Cabinet under John A Costello in 1948 as Minister for Industry and Commerce. Driving the Lee Scheme as an industrial project forward, the Minister sanctioned the scheme in 1949. The acquisition of land went ahead side by side with the other site preparations. In December 1952, the ESB announced that the contracts for the main civil works in connection with the river Lee hydroelectric development had been placed. On the back of over 20 years using German engineers, that connection was changed as the horrors of German involvement in World War II were felt across Europe. The Irish State now adopted the French national industrial model as an agent of nation state building. However, the German connection was maintained as the firm of Voiths were contracted to complete the electrical engineering parts of Inniscarra and Carrigadrohid Dams.
From the early nineteenth century, France had grown as a significant industrial power. There was a dramatic industrialization expansion in the 1920s but this was torn apart by German occupation in 1940. At the liberation of France in 1944, the French economy lay in ruins after the Nazi occupation as well as the affects of Allied bombing and invasion. Much of its infrastructure (ports, roads, rail) was destroyed and unusable. There was a chronic housing shortage and industrial output was low. The future strategy for their government, in terms of structural reforms of certain areas of the economy, was a nationalisation of resources including its aerospace industry, its coalmines, Air France, gas, electricity and the main deposit banks.
To be continued…
Generations: The Story of the Lee Hydroelectric Scheme (2007) by Kieran McCarthy and Seamus O’Donoghue is still available in local Cork bookshops and on Amazon.
Caption:
723a. Artists impression of Inniscarra Dam, early 1950s (source: ESB Archives, Dublin)