That 56 seconds, it took me to swim that gold medal win.

I looked for that feeling for 30 years and I never found it.

A podcast about the people behind the medals.

On the podium from the BBC World Service, find it wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm taking you back through the archive to the 1940s when electricity came to the Irish countryside.

We are here tonight celebrating a most important occasion.

A rural electrification for the parish of Banscher.

Tonight we intend to switch on the lights for this village.

It's May 1948 and Cameron John Hayes is about to hit a button

that will take his congregation in Banscher in Tipperary in Ireland out of the darkness.

It's a moment he's waited a long time to see.

The power of the River Shannon was harnessed in the 1920s to bring electricity to the big cities and towns of Ireland.

But those living in rural areas have had to wait 20 years for work to start on the rural electrification scheme.

It's described here in a promotional film for Ireland's Electricity Board, the ESB.

This is a scheme to bring the benefits of power to the large but scattered communities living outside the towns and villages.

The scheme will mean an easier way of life in rural homes and not only by giving heat and light.

The treasury of pumping and carrying water will gradually disappear as the electric pump brings modern sanitation to thousands of isolated dwellings.

The ESB didn't carry this out by handing it over to one of the assistant departments.

They set up a separate department and we called it the rural electrification office.

That's Patrick Dowling speaking in a 1996 documentary.

As one of the first engineers to be employed by the electricity board, he spent his early career connecting Ireland's towns to the grid.

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