Building Ireland (2014)

Architect Orla Murphy explores Dublin Airport’s first terminal building, a gem of modernist architecture constructed in the late 1930s. This iconic building heralded the birth of Modernist Irish architecture and was the gateway to an era of international air travel for an island nation. Now 80 years old, the terminal building embodies a spirit of innovation and ambition still evident at Dublin Airport.

Engineer Tim Joyce tells the incredible story of the Transatlantic Telegraph Cable’s arrival in West Kerry and the launch of the so-called “Victorian internet”. Engineer Brian McManus examines the innovative Irish science that rescued the project from disaster, and architect Orla Murphy tours the bespoke Victorian campus that sprang up around the cable station.

Geographer Susan Hegarty visits one of Ireland’s most remote regions to rediscover the extensive copper mines of Allihies. With our team of experts, she gets unique access to a subterranean world, and explores the scale of industrial activity in a West Cork Valley. At its peak, 1,600 miners dug for copper in the Berehaven Copper Mines on the Beara peninsula. It was the largest copper deposit in Europe at the time and the introduction of steam engine technology increased productivity. The iconic steam engine houses, now in ruins, once serviced a labyrinth of mineshafts below.

Engineer Tim Joyce explores a world-class engineering project, a power station hidden deep inside a granite mountain in County Wicklow. On top of the mountain, a man-made reservoir unleashes the power of this innovative pumped hydro-electric scheme built by Irish engineers in the late 1960s. Tim and the team of experts investigate how the reservoir feeds an underground hydro-electric power station – and vice versa. Turlough Hill Power Station was created in an area of environment and touristic sensitivity, in the days before renewable energy systems even entered the vocabulary.

Geographer Susan Hegarty discovers how the success of the Shannon Airport Free Trade Zone sparked the building of Ireland’s first new town in 300 years. Emerging as a response to rural decline and de-population in the 1950s, new industrial jobs prompted the construction of a new community on a green field site, built to the latest ideas in urban planning. Shannon Newtown became a multi-cultural oasis in rural Ireland and provided a model of socio-economic development that was exported to places like China and changed the lives of millions.

In 1922, the new Irish government set about solving Dublin's housing crisis with a revolutionary housing scheme. The Marino Garden Suburb was one of the first schemes in Europe to provide high quality public housing with spacious gardens and parkland. 1500 houses were ultimately built to a range of innovative architectural designs and they are just as desirable today as they were in the 1920s.