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The Irish Passport

Electrifying Ireland

The Irish Passport

The Irish Passport

Society & Culture

4.8652 Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2020

⏱️ 60 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode Naomi O'Leary and Tim Mc Inerney hear the voices of women who lived through a profound social transformation in Ireland: the coming of electricity. The ability to turn on a light or boil a kettle with just a switch came relatively late to large parts of Ireland, part of an ambitious project by the young state to economically transform Ireland and help it take its place among the nations of the earth. We explore the ways in which this changed people's lives, from the design of their houses to the food they ate, and how this transformation continues to inform social ideas about domestic work to this day. Featuring insights from design historian Sorcha O'Brien of Kingston University, the voices of ordinary women from around the Irish countryside who describe how electricity changed their lives, and material from the ESB archives. Check our our full interview with Dr O'Brien over at: https://www.patreon.com/posts/43027994 We are grateful to the Electric Irish Homes project and to the ESB for their help. Archive clips are copyright ESB and can be found at https://esbarchives.ie/. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter at @PassportIrish. If you enjoyed this episode, do give us a good review in your podcast app and share it with your friends.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello, welcome to Irish Passport.

0:02.3

Let's do it.

0:03.1

Welcome to the Irish Passport.

0:04.8

I'm Tim McInerney.

0:06.0

I'm Naomi O'Leary.

0:07.0

We're friends.

0:07.7

Can you both to Naomi?

0:08.5

Anwar Fat, Tim.

0:09.9

This is your passport to Irish culture, history and politics.

0:13.2

Uh-huh.

0:13.4

I'm recording.

0:14.2

One, two, two, three.

0:16.6

Okay.

0:35.6

Hi, and welcome back to the Irish Passport podcast. Today, Tim, we have an electrifying topic to discuss.

0:41.2

We are going to be looking at what has been called Ireland's Quiet Revolution, the expansion

0:46.8

of electricity across the country in the 20th century. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And now, listen,

0:52.6

I mean, when we were coming to this topic, I thought, Jesus, like, what on earth are we going to say about this?

0:56.7

But, like, the minute we started researching this, it became pretty clear that this is actually really fascinating.

1:03.3

First of all, electricity didn't actually make its way across Ireland until really, really, really late.

1:09.2

There was electricity in Ireland since the 19th century,

1:11.8

but in some parts of Ireland, and I mean significant parts of Ireland,

1:15.2

people were just living pretty happily without electricity until the mid-1960s.

...

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