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| Poolbeg Power Station circa 1997 © Eugene Brennan |
You may have heard on the news a couple of years ago that the dual red-and-white striped smokestacks of the Poolbeg Generating Station at Ringsend in Dublin were going to be painted and the concrete in the structures had been checked and was found to be 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 regularly shown in wide shots in TV dramas set in the city. Construction of number 1 chimney, which is 207.48m (680 ft 9in) high, was completed in 1971, followed by number 2 chimney in 1978. The second chimney is slightly taller at 207.8m (681 ft 9in). Construction was led by Maurice O'Sullivan of the ESB Civil Works Department. A slipform technique was used, workers pouring concrete into a massive ring-shaped mould. When the concrete in the first ring was cured, the mould was hydraulically jacked up in preparation for the next pour. 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. |
| 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 a short distance away from 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, including the area around Irishtown Nature Park, east of Irishtown and Ringsend. 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, the river was less spread out, increasing the flow over a narrower span, resulting in a faster flow as the tide went out, removing silt in the process. 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, with soldiers marching along it, 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. A few fragments of the fort remain, including walls and abutments of arches from gatehouses.
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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 between 1793 and 1795, called after a caretaker’s lodge built there in 1760. The first caretaker, John Pidgeon, was appointed in 1761. According to Dublin City Council the former hotel is “a classical building in form made of dressed ashlar granite consisting of three storeys over basement with full height bows to either end of the south east elevation and its entrance facing the Liffey and its own harbour.” 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. You may 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. In 1902, the first power station in Dublin was built on the site — the coal-fired Pigeon House Power Station. This was operated by the Dublin Corporation Lighting Committee, pre-ESB. It’s a brick building that 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.
References
Clerkin, P. (2013) ‘1814 – Pigeon-House Fort, Dublin’, Archiseek.com, 3 January.
ESB Archives (2016) Ringsend Power Station pamphlet.
ESB (2024) ‘ESB announces details of maintenance work for Poolbeg Chimneys including repainting’, ESB, 26 July.
Dublin Waste to Energy (n.d.) ‘The Facility’, Dublin Waste to Energy.
McDonald, F. (1996) ‘South Wall cracks under ravages of sea after 250 years’, The Irish Times, 20 June.