One of the first major infrastructure projects for the Free State was the Shannon hydroelectric power station at Ardnacrusha, Co. Clare. It involved the construction of a huge dam and a power station, the scale of which had never been seen before, to harness the waters of the River Shannon to power a national electric grid. This far-seeing civil engineering project would eventually enable the rural electrification of Ireland.
The idea of the Shannon Scheme was the brainchild of a young Irish engineer, Dr Thomas A. McLaughlin (1896-1971), who had worked as a graduate for Siemens-Schucker in Berlin in 1922 (1). He returned to Ireland the following year with a proposal for Siemens to implement this electricity expansion to the Irish government. His Shannon Scheme was more productive and cost-effective than the Dublin-centred plan, based on the River Liffey, which was then being considered (2). The contract for the construction work was awarded to Siemens in 1925.
The power station had, as Seán Rotherty writes, a 'truly Germanic look' in its utility with its high-pitched roof with tiny dormer windows in its double attic. The large steel-framed and concrete-walled power station has an impressive industrial look devoid of ornamentation. It is a monumental complex of transformer rooms, control rooms, switch houses and cooling houses but they are interconnected to give the streamlined appearance of a single building. The dam/sluice house to the rear of the power station has a flat roof with a T-shaped plan. The power station is a protected structure on the Clare County Council Development Plan (RPS No. 311).
The Electricity Supply Board (ESB) was created to manage the new station in 1927 with Dr Thomas A. McLaughlin appointed as its first managing director. The Shannon Scheme was operational in 19293, producing almost all of Ireland’s electricity needs. It was one of the largest hydroelectric stations in the world, creating 3,000 jobs and costing about 20 per cent of the government expenditure. The Shannon Scheme formally opened on 22 July 1929.
The legacy of the German engineering at Ardnacrusha is present today with the standard electric voltage in Ireland at 220 volts following the German system, as opposed to 240 volts in the UK (4). The Shannon power station continues to produce electricity but its output is today only a tiny percentage of the national electricity production. It changed the Irish landscape physically with substations and generators as well as poles, pylons and wires, metaphorically bringing modernity and ambition to the fledging Free State.
Thank you to photographer John Glynn for his generous use of his photographs and to Dermot Finnan of ESB. Read more entries from the 100 Buildings series here.
NOTES
(1) Seán Rothery, Ireland and the New Architecture 1900-1940, (1989), p.143.
(2) Gareth Doherty, 'Power: Are You Getting the Light? Ardnacrusha, the Rural Electrification Scheme and Illuminating Ireland's Peripheries’ in John McLaughlin and Gary Boyd (eds). Infra-Éireann: Infrastructure and the Architectures of Modernity in Ireland 1916 – 2016 (2015), p.35.
3 Paul Larmour, Free State Architecture : Modern Movement Architecture in Ireland, 1922 – 1949 (2009), p.13.
4 Gary A. Boyd and John McLaughlin, Infra-Éireann: Infrastructure and the Architecture of Modernity in Ireland 1916 – 2016 (2015), p.36.
