Tunnel tigers, McAlpine's Fusiliers and the Connacht men who built the "Big Ditch" - the Manchester Ship Canal - have been acknowledged in a new book on the"forgotten" migrant workers of the last two centuries.
"Navvy" was the more general nickname, and the enormous contribution made by this "special breed of men" to the British economy is highlighted in an extensive work of research by Ultan Cowley. The term "navvy" is an abbreviation of "navigators" - the colloquial term for the excavators of the commercial canal system laid out in Britain two centuries ago.
The first such project was actually on this island - the Newry Canal in Co Down, begun in 1731. Waterways extending to almost 4,000 miles were built between 1745 and 1830, and railway building then took over until the turn of the century. As Cowley records, the construction methods pioneered by the canal builders were adapted for railway construction and the navvies made that "smooth transition".
At the peak of railway building in 1845, some 200,000 navvies were employed, many of them Irish. Some 55 years later, almost 20,000 route miles of rail had been laid. During the 19th and 20th centuries, there was hardly a major construction project in Britain that did not have a strong Irish input, and the hazards are well documented in Cowley's book. "One or two deaths" per mile of railway was considered unremarkable.
Cowley traces the navvies' roots to the original migrant workers - the spailpíns and tattie hokers who worked on harvesting jobs across the water. Seasonal migration lived on in the west, with the industrialised centres of Britain becoming the main attraction.
It was a tough, hard lifestyle which took its toll. "Really, it's not livin' at all," he quotes one man from Erris as saying in a 1972 RTÉ documentary, Doohoma. "You lost a lot, with your wife and then with your family."
From the early part of the last century, tunnelling became a lucrative occupation - be it the Kinlochleven hydroelectric scheme, on which Patrick MacGill was employed - or the Channel tunnel. By the 1940s several successful Irishmen were challenging the domination of the sector by the big British companies - namely, Taylor Woodrow, Tarmac, Mowlem, Balfour Beatty, Laing and Wimpey.
Joseph and John Murphy of Cahirciveen, Co Kerry, represented "the best known example" of that "spectacular rise to wealth and influence", Cowley notes. They were to be joined by the Durkan Group, the Clancy Group, McNicholas plc, Kennedy Construction among nine such Irish companies with multimillionpound annual turnovers.
Cowley draws extensively from original sources, from newspapers, from the writings of Patrick MacGill, Donall Mac Amhlaigh and John Healy, and he also carried out his own interviews. He pays tribute to the work of the Irish chaplaincy in providing a social service to the men. And he quotes Sir Robert McAlpine's reputed last wish: "If the men wish to honour my death, allow them two minutes' silence; but keep the mixer going,and keep Paddy behind it."
The Men Who Built Britain: A History of the Irish Navvy by Ultan Cowley, published by Wolfhound Press, €25 hardback.
