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| Poolbeg Power Station circa 1997 © Eugene Brennan |
You
may have heard on the news this morning that the two red and white
smokestacks of the Poolbeg Power Station at Ringsend in Dublin are going
to be painted and the concrete in the structures has been checked and
is in good condition. However the future of the Poolbeg chimneys has yet
to be decided. The structures are iconic, being one of the landmarks
visible when flying into Dublin and also often shown in wide shots in TV
dramas set in the city. Construction of the two chimneys was completed
in 1971 and 1978 and according to the ESB media centre, the smokestacks
haven't been used for 15 years since the oil fired power station was
decommissioned and upgraded to burn gas.
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| A photo from circa 1997. The former 18th century Pigeon House Hotel is centre of picture with brick Pigeon House Power Station behind it © Eugene Brennan |
I
worked in the "Powerhouse" from 1994 to 1998, a Bolton Trust funded
enterprise centre for fledgling start-up companies, located at the foot
of the chimneys. At that stage, they belched out white and yellow fumes
from the burning of oil, the smoke drifting most days out over the
Irish Sea. The area has been in use for various purposes over 200 years
and a lot of the land was reclaimed from the sea. The mouth of the
River Liffey was originally a mudflat and to improve ship navigation,
the Great South Wall was built, which created a narrower and deeper
river channel. By confining the river between the North and South Walls,
this made it less spread out, increasing flow over a narrower width and
causing the riverbed to become scoured naturally as the tide went out.
Piles were driven in 1715 and major construction of the wall started in
1717 and eventually finished in 1795. Several paintings from the time
showed a causeway leading out to the wall, although this has widened
since due to reclamation. The area then became a fort, built from 1814
onwards when there was a threat of a Napoleonic invasion.
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| The Pigeon House Fort. Illustration courtesy The National Library of Ireland. |
The
now ESB-owned Powerhouse building I worked in was originally the
Pigeon House Hotel, built in 1793. Alongside the structure is an old
dock where sailing ships would have berthed. When the Pigeon House Fort
was built, the hotel was repurposed and used as officers quarters. In
1902, the first power station in Dublin was built on the site, the coal
fired Pigeon House Power Station. This is a brick building which
appeared in a Boyzone video and also the drama, Dublin Murders.
It was decommissioned in 1976. Ringsend Power Station, located near
the roundabout for the East Link Toll Bridge at Irishtown was another
coal fired station, commissioned in 1955-56 and demolished in the
noughties to make way for the new ESB Dublin Bay Power Plant. Also
located in the area is the Ringsend Energy to Waste Facility which
processes 600,000 tonnes of residual solid waste annually and generates
approximately 60 MW of power.
You
may also remember the Pigeon House Hotel being used as the setting for the
drama series Taken Down, about asylum seekers living in a direct
provision centre. It has turned up again in several scenes from the second season of the drama, The Tourist.
References: