Train a-comin’ - The Iron Horse Arrives in Ireland
As Catholics began to get educated in a way they had been prohibited and prevented from doing before the passing of the Act, the transport system was also beginning to catch up, as trains arrived in Ireland from 1834. Prior to this, transport had consisted of coaches - mostly those carrying mail - and canal boats, a slow progress to be had either way. A remarkably short time behind England, Ireland’s first railway was opened in 1834 as the Dublin & Kingstown Railways (D&KR) which connected Dublin to the suburb of Dun Laoghaire, called at the time Kingstown, in honour of the visit of King George IV. Point of note: the only reason His Majesty was there was that he was too drunk to get off the ship he arrived in, historically the first time an English monarch had visited Ireland for peaceful purposes, and had to be taken ashore at Howth instead.
The D&KR was the first railway not only in Europe, but the world, to be exclusively dedicated to commuter travel. Early railways in America and other parts of Europe had been used primarily to convey freight or cattle, or were for specific uses but not open to the public. Ireland was also the first nation to construct her own locomotives. Of course, initially railways were confined to the larger cities such as Dublin and Limerick, where investors could be attracted and where profits could be made. The man who oversaw the building and laying of most of these early railways, and who is credited with the title of “father of the Irish railways” is this guy.
William Dargan (1799 - 1867)
“Since I was ten years old, I have been hearing that we are unable to do anything …. for our own prosperity ... that we must have English capital, English judgment, English enterprise. English everything. Why I bring this forward is with the knowledge that there is one great interest in which that doctrine is disproved.”
Literally a local boy done good, Dargan was the son of a poor tenant farmer who worked on the Earl of Portarlington’s estate. Being a Catholic, opportunities were few for him but he managed, through dint of hard work and a head for numbers, to secure a place in a surveyor’s office in his home town. Impressed by his progress there, a local MP and other prominent businessmen helped him to meet Thomas Telford, one of Scotland’s primary engineers, who put him to work on the Holyhead-London Road. He also worked on English canals and the Howth Road in Dublin. When the Irish Parliament gave the go-ahead for the first Irish railway he worked tirelessly to promote it, lobbying and giving his own time for free until the thing was finally built in 1834. He later worked on the Ulster Canal, and then other railways, such as the Dublin and Drogheda, the Great Southern and Western and the Midland Great Western.
Unlike unscrupulous railroad barons in America, who earned reputations for being double-handed, unfair and corrupt, and who paid a pittance to their workers, Dargan was known to be more than a fair man; in fact, he paid the highest wages in the sector and was one of the few employers who paid not only in hard cash rather than “in kind”, as many workers were, but also paid better wages for those who worked harder and whose work was of a sufficient quality to merit higher pay. The unions, of course, had a problem with this initially but eventually such conditions were accepted; in a time when the worker was being royally ripped off, they really couldn’t afford to block such an enterprise, and besides, the incentive to work harder and better for more wages would become a model for future employers, and continues today. It was good for Ireland, good for the Irish worker, and good for Dargan. It also helped that he was so well-liked and trusted, some of this possibly due to his fervent nationalism.
Offered a knighthood he declined, and again when Queen Victoria herself visited him and offered him this time a baronetcy. This visit was on the occasion of Her Majesty attending the Dublin Exhibition, which had come about again thanks to the railway man. Impressed by the British Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, Dargan proposed a similar event be staged in Ireland, to showcase her relatively rapid advances in technology and show the world that the country was more than just backwards farmers working in fields. He ended up having to fund the whole thing, to the tune of £80,000 (about seven million today) and, though he lost over a quarter of that sum on the project was able, thanks to contributions and subscriptions to what was set up as the Dargan Fund in his honour, to open the National Art Gallery.
Dargan was known to be a dedicated man, living in a mobile office and following the tracks as they were laid. He was not one to sit back in a comfortable city residence and be brought details of the progress of his railways; he was out inspecting them and making comments and suggestions as they went down. With no real access to any sort of industrial machinery at the time - Ireland being well behind Britain and the rest of Europe as the Industrial Revolution unfolded, being mostly a country based on farming and agriculture, and moreover, held very much down by the British occupier - most of the work was done manually, with hard sweat and graft.
Dargan was also one of the few Catholics who worked on a project in Ulster, taking over the laying of the Belfast to Lisburn line, and extending it into Portadown and later Armagh, and even excavating an island at Belfast harbour for his later shipping concerns to allow it to become a major port for the first time, where today the great shipyards of Harland and Wolff stand. During the Great Famine, when it seemed all of Ireland was dying of starvation, Dargan performed many humanitarian works, including paying men a week’s wages and then sending them home to regain their strength, everyone too weak to work. It’s estimated he saved thousands of lives this way, people who would otherwise have died of hunger, and gained himself even more of a place in the hearts of Irish Catholics.
He was responsible for developing the outlying town of Bray, Co. Wicklow into a popular holiday and amusement resort - I remember when a child our big day out being to go to the amusements at Bray, and the best part of it was the train journey there, as we really had no need to go on the train otherwise, though where we lived there was a railway bridge right at the top of the road, and you could hear and see the trains thunder past on their way out of the city or back into it, day and night. But looking at the trains was one thing; for kids in Ireland in the 1970s, getting to actually travel on one was a treat. My mother used also to take us on what the train company called “the Mystery Train” at the weekend, which was exactly what it sounds like: you were not told where the train was going, so it was a surprise when you ended up in Enniskillen or Navan or Portmarnock or Leixlip, or wherever it was going.
Dargan’s efforts almost single-handedly helped to revitalise the falling Irish economy, the much more so when you consider how much of his own money he put into projects (of the £18 million invested in Irish railways the British government only contributed a paltry £3 million) and it might not be too much of a stretch to call him Ireland’s saviour. Certainly, when he died of complications following a fall from his horse in 1863 his funeral was attended by a 700-strong honour guard of railway workers, and comprised 250 cortege carriages, his remains laid to rest beside the other Great Emancipator, Daniel O’Connell, in Glasnevin. A statue of him now stands outside the National Gallery.
Perhaps ironically, given the state of Ireland and the distrust of Catholics at the time, one of his greatest tributes comes from Prince Albert, who stated
“Mr Dargan is the man of the people. He is a simple, unobtrusive, retiring man, a thorough Irishman, not always quite sober of an evening, industrious, kind to his workmen, but the only man who has by his own determination & courage put a stop to every strike or combination of workmen, of which the Irish are so fond. All he has done has been done on the field of Industry & not of politics or Religion, without the Priest or factious conspiracy, without the promise of distant extraordinary advantages but with immediate apparent benefit. The Exhibition, which must be pronounced to be very successful, has done wonders in this respect. A private undertaking, unaided by Govt, or any Commission with Royal Authority, made and erected at the sole expense of a single Individual, & this an Irish Road contractor, not long ago a common labourer himself, who had raised himself solely by his own industry & energy, - it deserves the greatest credit & is looked upon by the Irish with infinite self-satisfaction as an emblem of national hope"
By the end of his life Dargan is said to have laid thousands of miles of railway tracks, and contributed hugely to linking the largely disparate country up. As every railway built in the world did, the Irish rail system helped bring people closer together, not only by making commerce and travel to once-distant towns and cities possible, but by allowing the rapid distribution of newspapers, thus disseminating news across the country in a far more timely manner than it had ever been before. It also encouraged people to travel, to take holidays, to visit other places, something that had not been envisaged prior to the advent of the railway, journeys by canal or carriage slow and often very uncomfortable, and usually available only to the more well-to-do. A railway network turned Ireland from a scattering of independent and isolated counties and towns into a well-connected, interdependent and linked single country.