Ireland's industrial past has been largely overlooked, but a vital new book uncovers a rich history of manufacture and engineering, writes Eileen Battersby
Look around you: whether you are sitting in a city traffic jam, or are moving not much faster along a narrow winding country road in the wake of a lumbering procession of heavy trucks and tractors, or you are fortunate enough to be sitting peacefully on a fine old stone bridge, traces of Ireland's considerable, if unsung, industrial heritage surround you. In fact, the beautiful bridge upon which you may or may not be currently sitting is part of it, as is that pretty canal house you noticed a few miles back.
Just as the gauntly elegant remains of tower houses and other castles dominate the countryside, evidence of various stages of Ireland's industrial evolution also remains if out of neglect rather than care. Irish archaeology is considered not to exist beyond 1700. Equally, the bridges, canals, mills and warehouses that were once vital working units of an emerging economy are usually regarded as architectural rather than archaeological. Such misconceptions should be finally corrected by Dr Colin Rynne's magnificent achievement, Industrial Ireland 1750-1930: An Archaeology.
This awesome volume is the most important work of historical scholarship to be published in Ireland this year, and is certainly one of the most important Irish publications of recent years (even with a few editing errors which must be corrected for subsequent editions, of which there should be several).
Yet again it reflects the value of a multi-disciplinary approach to such studies: economic and social history meet archaeology and architectural history and, with them, the story of settlement. Just as a mining operation brought with it a mining community, the establishment of an industry helped create a town, or city, and eventually an infrastructure, including water services and power. Many old factories and antiquated petrol stations tell their own stories and those of the people who owned them and worked in them. It should be pointed out that Dr Rynne does not engage in related working conditions - this is an archaeology, not a polemic.
The Industrial Revolution as experienced in Britain did bypass Ireland, a predominately agricultural country until relatively recently. Industrial activity did take place in Ireland; however, many of these industries flourished and then faltered, often due to poor transport system and the catastrophic impact of the Famine. Yet Ireland did have her share of industrialists and entrepreneurs.
"Contrary to the hopes and aspirations of many," writes Dr Rynne, "and despite its immediate proximity to the cradle of European industrialisation, most of Ireland never became industrialised in either an English or a European sense. Consequently, in English industrial archaeology, explanation begins with why industrialisation took place; in Ireland the issue is why it did not and, more to the point, who was to blame. 'Failure' is the key word in the economic history of Ireland, but while its resonances have been all-pervasive, they have all too often hidden the successes."
Throughout the book, which is arranged in 17 self-contained chapters such as Animal, Wind and Water Power; Fossil Fuels; Iron and Steel; Building Materials; Textiles; Shipbuilding; Roads and Bridges; Inland Navigation: Canals and Rivers; Railways; and Aspects of Industrial Settlement, which stand alone and also form part of what is a fascinating narrative chronicling the evolution of a nation, he notes the connections, such as how the origins of Ireland's network of inland navigation and canals were closely linked to the exploitation of coal deposits. He is also alert to the consequences. "This was, however, by no means always a positive development. While the construction of the Grand Canal enabled some of the coal from the Castlecomer field to reach larger markets (as did the River Barrow), these same trade routes also enabled the transit of cheaper, imported coal from Swansea to reach inland markets."
ONE OF THE enduring stories of Irish coal mining is that of the Arigna coalfield in Co Roscommon. Coal from these collieries did travel during the 1880s in bulk to Dublin and Limerick via the Shannon and the midlands canal networks. A dramatic photograph dated c.1915 shows a solemn group of miners who could as easily be Russian or American, yet are Irish.
Period photographs as well as maps and diagrams are also a feature of the book. In the section on turf Rynne confirms that, in Europe, only Finland surpasses Ireland's percentage of peat bog. It is also interesting to consider that this fuel is harvested like a crop on a seasonal basis. In another photograph dated c.1915, peat workers in Co Tyrone pose as if standing on a stage. Rynne suggests that moss peat is excellent bedding for horses. "It had almost no smell, was easier to store than straw owing to its lack of bulk, and possessed up to four times the absorptive capacity of straw." Also it can absorb more ammonia, thus producing a manure of higher nitrogen content.
In the chapter on non-ferrous metals he makes the point that Ireland produced some of the oldest copper mines in Europe, the largest concentration of which are found on the Mizen Peninsula in west Cork. Some of these workings have been radiocarbon dated to 1700-1500 BC, while earlier evidence for copper mining in this country, dated between 2400-2000 BC, has been discovered at Ross Island, near Killarney, Co Kerry.
Irish stone also enjoyed an international profile. In 1637, Inigo Jones ordered black Kilkenny marble for the steps of St Paul's Cathedral in London, while architect Christopher Wren used Galway marble in the staircases of Kensington Palace. Irish building stone was exported to Britain throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Of the Irish marbles, only Connemara and Kilkenny are still quarried.
It was Dr Rynne who completed definitive studies on the early medieval millpond on High Island, off the Galway coast. This millpond was devised by the monks who settled on the island. It was used to power a small horizontal-wheeled grain mill for the monastery. Almost 1,000 years later, Victorian engineers working on a scheme on the Upper River Bann adopted a similar technique.
In 1999, Rynne published The Industrial Archaeology of Cork City and its Environs. It is a ground-breaking work and emphasised the need for similar studies of Dublin and particularly Belfast, the first fully industrialised city on this island as it could be argued that Dublin, Cork and Waterford owed their early emergence to their commercial rather than industrial importance.
There is no denying that large-scale industrialisation in 19th-century Ireland was invariably regional. British levels of industrialisation were confined to the north-east and the Ulster towns of Armagh, Antrim, Down, Derry, Carrickfergus, Tyrone and of course, Belfast, an industrial history in itself. Central to the early industrialisation of this region was flax.
By the late 17th century, fine linens remained the only important product that the increasingly self-sufficient British economy still had to import. There was the fact that Ulster farming was poor and many farmers had to supplement their income with weaving.
AMONG HISTORY'S IRONIES is that English visitors to Ireland during the late 18th and early 19th centuries were impressed by Irish roads. There is an explanation: due to Ireland's undeveloped state, the roads were little used and therefore were not as rutted as those in England, which were by then showing the strains of transporting goods and materials. Transportation, and indeed travel, on Irish roads became a lasting problem. The short-lived Irish rail system has been well covered by specialist historians yet it remains a melancholic story.
Dr Rynne traces the evolution of bridges from wood - and refers to the earliest example found thus far, that dated AD804 at the monastic settlement of Clonmacnoise, Co Offaly - and moves on to masonry bridges, some of which date from the medieval period, and are among the most beautiful features of the Irish waterscape, and on to iron and suspension bridges - including Europe's oldest surviving example, the graceful footbridge built around 1816 by the second earl of Rosse at Birr Castle - and ultimately to the functional, non-aesthetic reality of the modern concrete bridge.
Survival for many examples of industrial archaeology lies in change of use. Ducart's Limerick Custom House, completed in 1769, now houses the Hunt Museum. The Cork Custom House, dating from 1724, is now part of the Crawford Gallery. James Gandon's majestic Dublin Custom House, one of Europe's finest neoclassical buildings, and which was described by Henry Grattan as a "bombastic vanity", survived the shelling in 1923, and restoration, to continue to dominate Dublin's regenerated docklands.
Nowadays, in an era in which development means destruction of the past, it is useful to look at how industrial and manufacture, from the linen and ship-building of Belfast, to the Guinness brewery in Dublin, which at one time employed 153 horses to transport its product, had a part in developing a nation's identity.
• Industrial Ireland 1750-1930: An Archaeology, by Dr Colin Rynne, is published by Collins Press