Ardnacrusha at 100: What could happen if Ireland showed similar ambition today and invested 20% of national budget in energy? 

In the 1920s, the young Irish Free State made a radical choice.

It took roughly 20 per cent of the national budget and spent it on the Ardnacrusha hydroelectric scheme in Co Clare.

It was 100 years ago this month when the process towards realisation began with the Shannon Electricity Act coming before the Dáil.

“It was a huge sum of money [£5.2 million] when Ireland had nothing,” economist Prof John FitzGerald of Trinity College Dublin says. “To invest that was massive. We haven’t seen anything like that in infrastructure investment since.”

At the time it was one of the largest infrastructure projects in the world, taking four years to complete. The ESB, the first Irish semistate company, was set up in 1927 to manage the project and it electrified the nation.

Built by the German company Siemens-Schuckert, Ardnacrusha was responsible for 80 per cent of the State’s electricity for years.

Ardnacrusha “was transformative, not just because it lit light bulbs”, says Michael Bernard, a leading US-based futurist on climate and energy, “but because it showed what determined public investment could do. That same proportion of public spending today – about €24 billion over five years – could be deployed again, but what would be as transformative?”

The possibilities are real, the technologies proven and the costs increasingly manageable, he says.

So what could €24 billion deliver in clean energy? What if Ireland spent the same money on ...
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