Rundale

Adam Stoneman

Among the allegorical figures in Séan Keating’s painting, Night’s Candles Are Burnt Out (1928-29), stand the artist and his wife May clutching their children and pointing in wonder at the monumental edifice of Ardnacrusha hydroelectric power station. If the artist’s family represents the promise of modernity for future generations, the skeleton hanging in the opposite corner, along with the priest, the gombeen businessman, and the drunken ‘stage Irish’, symbolises the death of old Ireland. Keating described his painting as “The dim candle light of surviving medievalism … fading before the rising sun of scientific progress”. James Joyce, playing on the double meaning of ‘wake’, expressed the sentiment with greater exigency: “Erdnacrusha, requiestress, wake em!”

A century after its construction, Ardnacrusha still retains its power to inspire awe and wonder. If its turbines, towers, and concrete edifices still represent hope and potential for the future more than anachronisms of the past, it is because its story remains incredible: that a 26 year old graduate engineer, Thomas McLaughlin, could convince the government of his vision for a state-led hydroelectricity scheme for harnessing the power of the Shannon; that a conservative Cumann na nGaedheal government would commit £5.2 million or 20% of its annual budget towards the project; that a newly independent, impoverished and war-torn state in partnership with a German engineering firm could deliver, within four years, the then-largest hydroelectric power station in the world; that it would supply almost 100% of the state’s electricity needs, and enable the electrification of the country in the following decades; that it still functions and produces electricity today, if now only meeting 1% of demand.

The story of Ardnacrusha is not just impressive, it is almost inconceivable at a time when urgent large-scale infrastructural demands in housing, water, energy and transport seem impossible to meet.

In contrast to Ardnacrusha, the National Children’s Hospital stands as a monument to ineptitude; plagued with problems from the outset, a ballooning budget, chronic delays and accusations of mismanagement, with a current estimated cost of €2.2 billion increased from a budget of €650 million, it is now promised to open in July 2026, a decade after construction began. Along with year after year of missed housing targets, the shelving of the DART+ Tunnel and the ever-stalled Galway ring road, severe pressures on our healthcare system and strained energy and water supplies, the state’s ability to deliver visionary, ambitious, large-scale infrastructure appears to be at an all-time low.

Runaway budgets, interminable delays, and abandoned projects are now common features of large-scale infrastructural development, and as the ongoing sagas of Britain’s HS2 or California’s high-speed rail project demonstrate, this is not a problem confined to Ireland. Politicians routinely promise major infrastructural development, yet there is little confidence in their capacity to deliver. Why is it that we seem incapable of building the infrastructure we need?

After instigating and directing the Shannon Scheme, McLaughlin served as an executive Director at the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) for thirty years. Addressing the Institute of Civil Engineers as its President in 1950, he warned of bureaucracy’s stultifying effect; the freedom to exercise initiative was being replaced by “frustration and helplessness”, and “administrative control of the professions” was in danger of causing “grave damage to progress”.

The complaint that bureaucracy inhibits human initiative and development, as old as bureaucracy itself, was echoed more recently by Limerick-born billionaire and co-founder of Stripe, John Collison, as part of a concerted media blitz in which he argued that Ireland’s capacity to deliver infrastructure is being obstructed by a complicated web of regulatory agencies that should be replaced by politicians empowered to make executive decisions on planning and development.

It is true that a century ago when McLaughlin was working on the Shannon Scheme, there were less planning laws, health and safety and environmental regulations; it is also true that there were serious social and environmental consequences as a result; these contradictions need to be reckoned with when assessing Ardnacrusha’s achievements.

Labourers were paid a meagre agricultural wage which led to an ultimately unsuccessful period of strike action in 1925; living conditions for workers were abysmal with many finding shelter in cow sheds and pigsties. The work was dangerous; 33 men lost their lives during construction. The building of Ardnacrusha has been described by Michael McCarthy as “a signal black mark in the state’s labour history”.

The Scheme also caused significant devastation to the Shannon’s wild salmon population and the communities sustained by it; despite the building of fish passes in 1929 and 1954, salmon populations have never fully recovered. Finance Minister Patrick McGilligan was at least honest about his priorities: “if in a case of conflict between fishery and electricity interests, then electricity is going to have the superiority”.

Does the altar of progress require the sacrificing of environmental protections and labour rights? For Collison, the answer is yes; “environmental goals are causing stasis” and “red tape” is hampering development. But what kind of development, and in whose interests? Public and private interests can starkly diverge when prioritising infrastructure, and habitual criticism of bureaucracy can disguise radically different motivations and ends – constructive, desiring a better functioning, more transparent regulatory system, or destructive, wanting it to disappear altogether.

The century since Ardnacrusha has been producing electricity for the nation has seen the postwar settlement and development of the welfare state, rising living standards, and a period of increased social equality. From the 1980s this gave way to the present period of neoliberalism in which there has been a rolling back of these social gains through a reassignment of power to commercial interests, with cuts to public services, privatisation and outsourcing; as a result the state’s capacity to take an interventionist role in planning and delivering infrastructure has been severely curtailed. This has circumscribed our ‘infrastructural imaginary’ – the limits of what is considered possible. The most recent National Development Plan, published last July, is a case in point; despite claims to the contrary, it is tepid and lacks boldness or vision, particularly when it comes to regional development, failing to identify any large-scale projects outside of Dublin’s Metrolink.

In the present context, Collision’s intervention appears to be an attempt to roll back what he perceives to be state interference in private-led development and unbridled corporate growth. There are strong echoes of the ‘YIMBY’ (Yes In My Backyard) lobby which emerged in Collison’s adopted home of San Francisco in the 2010s, and has successfully pushed California state to slash regulation in the years since. Yet this pro-private development agenda has resolutely failed to deliver affordable homes and San Francisco’s homelessness crisis has only deteriorated because affordable housing – and other forms of vital infrastructure – is not profitable enough to be answered by market forces. Ardnacrusha was not built due to a lack of regulations, but because the state marshalled its resources with vision and ambition, and was not beholden to the private sector.

In 1924, then Minister for Industry and Commerce Patrick McGilligan sought to involve companies in the electrification of Ireland, even visiting the United States to court private investment. Yet while US firms showed initial interest; it soon became clear that the high cost of connecting rural households to the grid and the low return on their energy usage meant the project would not be sufficiently profitable.

McGilligan had no option but to proceed with the semi-state Electricity Supply Board, and so Ireland followed the Soviet Union, which had launched its GOELRO plan five years earlier, as one of the first countries in the world to have a nation-wide electricity network managed and owned by the state, albeit with an element of private enterprise. This was despite McGilligan’s own political convictions, and in the face of stinging criticism in the Oireachtas, including from Senator Sir John Keane, who warned that this model would “drive all private capital out of the country, and … draw us into the meshes of inefficient socialism.” Another Senator remarked that Keane saw in the scheme “the cloven hoof of socialism”.

McGilligan was hard-nosed and intransigent in his dealings with the German engineering firm Siemens-Schuckert, holding them to agree to deliver the project at cost (it helped that Germany was in dire need of foreign currency and sought reputational value from the scheme with the aim of rebuilding the country after the First World War). The Minister fought Siemens hard over their claims when they emerged from the first phase of the project with a substantial loss, paying out only a token sum of £150,000, in contrast to the €880 million surrendered by the government to BAM’s legion of lawyers over the construction of the National Children’s Hospital.

McGilligan’s decision to accept this state-managed model must be understood in the political context of an intense period of nationalism and state building. The Shannon Scheme was propelled by patriotism and nationalist ideals of self-sufficiency. In his presentation to cabinet in 1924, McLaughlin, referencing Arthur Griffith, who had died only two years before, reminded his audience that political freedom was dependent on economic freedom, and argued that the Shannon Scheme presented the opportunity “at last of utilising one of the great natural resources of the country for the good of the people of the country”, echoing Pádraic Pearse’s call in 1913 that a “free Ireland” would “harness the rivers” and “make those resources available”.

In his book, The Broken Promise of Infrastructure, Dominic Davies describes ‘infrastructures of feeling’, adapting Raymond Williams’s term, in which our everyday experiences of roads, housing, healthcare are filtered through a prism of narratives and affects, “how seemingly mundane infrastructures are always thick with cultural meaning, shaped by and shaping what it is possible for us to feel, think, and imagine”.

The slogans ‘Britain is Broken’, ‘Make America Great Again’, and ‘Ireland has Fallen’ prey on these experiences of deteriorating public services and public provision and foment fear that crumbling infrastructure is a sign of existential decline. Rather than decades of underinvestment by the government, the far right blames this on migrants and minoritised communities, and treats access to infrastructure such as housing as a limited resource that must be violently restricted and policed.

In this context, Ardnacrusha stands as an alternative, an expanded infrastructural imaginary in which the state can intervene in bold, ambitious and imaginative ways to deliver infrastructure that meets social need. Developing schemes of similar ambition today requires a shift of priorities that would see infrastructure approached not primarily as a driver of GDP but as public works that respond to the urgent demand for transport, housing, healthcare, and clean energy over data centres and luxury hotels. The Irish word for infrastructure, ‘bonneager’, meaning the arrangement of the base or foundations, reminds us that such works are fundamental to living our lives with dignity.

The incredible story of Ardnacrusha still holds the potential to jolt us out of a fugue of depression and decline into an optimism for the future and a readiness to build a republic that provides for our needs:

‘Erdnacrusha, requiestress, wake em!’