Opinion: history shows we would not be well served by voluntarily re-instituting a broken, disjointed approach to energy infrastructure
By Sinéad Mercier, UCD
Next month, the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications will close its consultation process on whether to allow private companies to run private electricity wires. If the plans go ahead, private companies will be able to install, operate and own private electricity infrastructure for the first time since 1927, re-installing a system developed in the Victorian era.
When considering such a major change in our electricity and energy infrastructure, it is worth looking back at what the Irish state inherited a century ago. The wonder and awe delivered by electric light and power in the 18th and 19th centuries still captivates today in films such as The Prestige and The Illusionist. The era has been idealised as an age of boundless, stateless invention driven by competitive individuals: eccentric inventors, private businesses and their gentlemen patrons. Little wonder that Elon Musk named his electric car company after the futurist engineer Nikola Tesla.
But the reality of electricity in everyday life was quite different. In the cities and towns of Victorian Britain, gas lighting and power from coal resulted in mysterious deaths, as well as giant and deadly explosions. Competition favoured the unscrupulous. Different private companies routinely dug up public streets to lay unruly and unregulated gas pipelines. These companies would siphon gas off from one another or cut costs in pipe-laying, resulting in further leaks and explosions.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's The Business, interview with Jimmy and Frank Flanagan, whose family have been lighting the gas lamps on Dublin's Phoenix Park for over 130 years
Public debates in newspapers and parliaments fast became rife with complaints of 'oppressive monopolies’ with a stranglehold over public safety and urban development. In response, municipalities across Europe began to mandate that private gas companies be taken into local authority ownership after a set number of years. This was to ensure safety, standardisation and protection of the public.
In contrast to Britain and Europe, Ireland was blocked from doing the same, suffering the common fate of colonies and their public infrastructures. The majority of Irish people had no access to power - gas or electric - outside of factory work and depended on hand-cut turf for light and heat. As depicted by Grace Henry in her paintings of the interiors of Conamara homes, rural women in particular endured back-breaking work, dark, smoky rooms and families suffering from air pollution and illness.
Even the well-off in Irish urban areas found themselves at the mercy of low quality service and monopolies, with public representatives blocked from taking greater control of energy. Daniel O'Connell in particular railed against the control of Dublin’s development by London financiers. Believing that Irish businessmen would do a fairer job, he set up the short-lived Dublin Consumers Gas Company in 1845.
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From RTÉ Doc On One, Power Light & Heat is John Skehan's 1977 documentary on the days before rural electrification and how electricity has grown in Ireland, through the days of coal, turf and gas
Solutions to abuse began to coalesce around more public ownership of a new technology: electrification. Experience of the gas industry led to demands for electric power and light to be treated in a different way. Electricity even seems to have become imbued with a sense of burgeoning republicanism; the first public electric lighting being lit outside the offices of the leading nationalist newspaper, The Freeman's Journal, on Prince’s Street, Dublin in 1880.
When Dublin Corporation sought to follow the rest of Europe in municipalising electricity, the act was viewed as a precursor to Home Rule and strenuously opposed by loyalists and unionists. In 1900, loyalists and unionists introduced the Dublin Electric Lighting Bill (by Order) in the House of Commons which sought to roll back Dublin Corporation’s municipal control of electricity by re-opening it to private competition.
The desire for energy be in more public ownership was a foundational aspect of the new young Irish state. One of the first pieces of legislation passed by the Oireachtas was the Electricity (Supply) Act, 1927. This legislation established the Electricity Supply Board (ESB), nationalising the existing colonial mess of electricity companies, random wires and connections.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Doc On One, Then There Was Light tells the story of rural electrification, including the tales of fear and hope, and love and loss as the nation illuminated.
The ESB was controlled by democratic oversight over its direction, but with the competency, independence and command over complex interlocking systems to achieve those aims. Through this, the ESB delivered universal affordable access to electricity and regional employment. Its rural electrification scheme meant the most lonely mountains and dusky hills of Conamara now glittered with specks of light in the early winter dark. This process was emulated by many other states post-World War II on similar principles of public good and universal access, inspired too by Russia's GOELRO programme and Roosevelt's New Deal Rural Electrification.
But many former colonies have not had the chance to take the action that Ireland and other European states did. Those freeing themselves from empires in the 1960s inherited the same unequally distributed private wires and companies that Ireland did in 1921. The sad difference is that these countries were prevented from building their own ESB or Rural Electrification Scheme.
In return for international loans and finance in the 1970s, Global South countries were subjected to debt programmes which pushed for the deregulation and privatisation of energy systems. This Washington Consensus prioritisation of profit over public good in energy production has slowed action on poverty, environment and climate worldwide, weakening the infrastructures required for taking decisive action.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime, should Ireland's energy production be nationalised? With Gerry Duggan from the Irish Academy of Engineering and former adviser to the ESB and Sinéad Mercier from Sutherland School of Law UCD
Ireland’s energy system now faces an existential challenge. Fossil fuels are the single greatest contributor to climate change. We must completely shift the country’s transport, heating and power from oil and gas to energy efficiency and renewables. Widespread clean electrification is one of the best means of doing so.
But these aims are not well served by voluntarily re-instituting the broken, disjointed approach to energy infrastructure that colonised countries have historically been forced to endure. Instead we need greater democratic control over the energy system; mandating reductions in energy use by our biggest polluters, and requiring their contribution to the changes in the electricity grid. Let’s not unravel the ESB, but re-invigorate the principles it was established with in 1927, newly founded on purposes of ecological public good and value.
This research is part of a forthcoming book chapter 'A haunting absence: Tracing the origins of international energy law from the laboratory of Ireland', published as part of a series on Global Perspectives on Legal History, edited by Donal Coffey and Stefan Vogenauer and published by Max Planck Institute for Legal Theory and Legal History.
Sinéad Mercier is a Lecturer in environmental and planning law and ERC/UCD Sutherland School of Law PhD Researcher at the UCD Sutherland School of Law
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
