Silicon Docks

The Rise of Dublin as a Global Tech Hub

Joanna Roberts, J.J. Worrall, Elaine Burke, Philip Connolly, Pamela Newenham, Pamela Newenham

• Publisher: Liberties Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781910742006
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du 21ème siècle

Over the past fifteen years, many of the world's biggest technology firms have opened offices in Dublin. But just how did the Irish government convince the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to set up bases in Ireland? Find out how a series of last-minute negotiations between the IDA and Google convinced Sergey Brin and Larry Page to locate their European headquarters in Ireland instead of Switzerland. Discover the difficulty Facebook faced when it tried to register its company name in Ireland, as another firm had a similar name. Learn how a tweet to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone helped woo the social media platform. In Silicon Docks, a team of Irish journalists tell the inside story of how Dublin's decaying docklands were transformed into a hub for tech companies wanting to expand into Europe, and how attracting such firms helped kick-start Ireland's very own entrepreneurial boom. Tax is top of the agenda as Ireland fights off competition from other countries to be Europe's answer to Silicon Valley, but could changes on the horizon see government plans to attract more tech players unravel?

1.

The History of the Docklands

Joanna Roberts

On 27 May 1960, a small cargo boat laden with Guinness set off from Grand Canal Dock, destined for Limerick. Skirting Dublin’s city centre via the canal’s circular ring, she travelled through Portobello and Harold’s Cross, before joining the canal mainline at Suir Road and continuing west to meet the River Shannon.9

In one respect boat 51M was unremarkable, following, as she did, in the wake of hundreds of other barges used to transport goods between Dublin and the west of Ireland since the eighteenth century. However, this particular voyage had an added poignancy, for it was the last time that the Grand Canal would be used for commercial purposes. First the railways and then the roads had eliminated the need for goods to be transported by water. The cost and time involved in travelling by canal had long outweighed its benefits.

In 1796, when the Grand Canal’s circular ring first opened, it had formed the southern boundary of what was then a thriving port city. Every day, ships containing loads such as grain, coal, tobacco, metal ore and sugar arrived at the mouth of the River Liffey, guided on their way by the newly constructed North and South Bull Walls, which had been designed to create a channel into the river.

The Custom House, in use then, had been built in 1791 to replace the original building at Wood Quay, and the new structure had the effect of moving the location of the port away from the city centre towards the east. The quays against which the ships moored and the docks onto which they unloaded their sacks of cargo were also new, having been reclaimed from marshland to facilitate trade.

The thriving industrial economy and the round-the-clock nature of the port meant plenty of work for people who lived in the area. Goods were unloaded into quayside warehouses, with some earmarked for use in the city and others destined to continue their journey west along the Grand Canal. To unload and sort the goods that arrived required manpower, and so the shipping companies and factories employed local men as casual labour. To see a ship come in was to see huge numbers of men head to the quaysides in the hope of being picked to work as a docker for the day.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, industry grew rapidly in the docklands. Coal was the main source of fuel for most households and shiploads of it arrived every day from Britain and further afield. The area was chock-a-block with coal merchants and many people found work digging the coal out of the bowels of the ships.

Coal could also be turned into gas. In the 1820s, the Dublin Gas Company established a gasworks on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, which would produce gas for the city of Dublin for the next 150 years. A large gasometer – a circular metal skeleton surrounding a storage chamber that rose and fell as gas was produced and used – was erected at the corner of Macken Street and Sir John Rogerson’s Quay in 1934 and became a Dublin landmark.10

The land to the south of the Liffey also provided prime real estate for processing companies. Locating in the docklands meant having easy access to warehouses full of goods and a plentiful supply of water. A sugar refinery was set up to process sugar cane arriving from overseas. A large flourmill was built to serve Boland’s Bakery, which was situated on the road between the city and Ringsend. The area also became a centre of glassmaking, thanks to demand for glass bottles to store milk and Guinness, and a good supply of sand and water.

For over a century, the docklands remained a vibrant centre of trade. A new sewerage treatment works at Pigeon House in 1906 meant that the city’s sewage was no longer pumped straight into the Liffey. Inhabitants of the docklands were thus relieved of the stench that had blighted the air breathed by their forebears.11 But the twentieth century also brought other changes, ones that would alter the area beyond recognition.

A Changing Economy

The final delivery of Guinness along the canal marked just one of the ways in which times were changing for the docklands. It wasn’t just that goods were being transported away from the docks using different methods; the entire economic ecosystem around the docks was beginning to shift. From the 1950s onwards, technological advancements, increased globalisation and political decisions all combined to fundamentally alter the physical, social and economic fabric of Grand Canal Dock.

First came mechanisation. During World War II, supplies were for the first time transported in large rectangular containers that could be easily stacked, catalogued and transferred from one form of transport to another. The advantages of containerisation over the expense and complexity of employing people to load, unload and store sacks of cargo meant the practice quickly spread. Containers were used to transport goods on ships and then seamlessly transfer them to lorries for their onward journeys, eliminating the need for warehousing and sorting. Suddenly cranes and forklift trucks began to replace casual labourers and a large source of work for dockers ran dry. Between 1975 and 1984 employment in the port fell from 7,403 to 5,200.12

The early 1970s was also the time of decasualisation, where the daily uncertainty of whether or not work would be available was replaced with a more regulated system. A dockers’ register was set up, with work going only to registered dockers, and other benefits such as a weekly wage instead of daily pay. While this was introduced to give some certainty to employment, the big effect was that many men who had picked up day work for years were no longer required. A large number took payoffs and became unemployed. Yet even for those who continued to work, the prospects were shrinking. When decasualisation was introduced, 550 men were put on the dockers’ register. By 1992, there were just forty-two permanent dockers and one hundred in a supplementary pool.13

The combined impact of containerisation and decasualisation meant that Dublin, like many other port cities at the time, saw unemployment around the docklands increase dramatically. While there was still work around, opportunities were fewer and further between. People who had for years relied on the docks to provide them with manual work now found themselves unskilled and lacking in employment prospects. Low levels of education and lifetimes of manual labour did little to prepare dockers for other types of work.

Other docklands industries also began to decline. By the 1960s, electricity had become widespread in homes across Ireland, which reduced demand both for gas and the coal required to produce it. What’s more, the type of gas used in Ireland was changing. Natural gas, which was viewed as cleaner and cheaper than coal gas, had been found in the North Sea and off the coast of Kinsale, in County Cork. In the late 1970s, the newly created Bord Gáis began production of natural gas from the Kinsale field and, in 1983, a pipeline supplying gas from Cork to Dublin was opened. The infrastructure’s completion nailed the coffin closed on the Dublin Gas Company, which transferred its assets to Bord Gáis and shut up shop. More jobs were lost, and the gasworks became obsolete.

Europe also played a role. In 1973, Ireland joined the European Economic Community (EEC), with the promise of free trade, access to funds and reduced dependency on the UK market. However, EEC membership also meant throwing off the policy of protectionism that defined Irish industry. Restrictions and tariffs on imports were now things of the past, and many Irish industries suffered as the economy adjusted to the new environment.

Employment in the docklands declined further as more factories closed down. Others chose to move out of the city and into areas on the outskirts of Dublin, where manufacturing clusters were forming. In the late 1970s, Boland’s Biscuits merged with Jacob’s Biscuits and moved its factories from Grand Canal Dock out to Tallaght, on the south-west fringes of the city.14

All these factors swirled together to form a perfect storm. By the late 1980s, what had once been a noisy, active industrial quarter providing a reliable source of manual work had fallen quiet. As mechanisation increased and factories closed or moved out of town, work dried up. The area fell into rapid decline.

The Docklands Drain

For a community that was so tied to the jobs that came with the area, the industrial decline proved devastating. For years, people lived close to the docks so they could get there quickly and be first in line to be picked for work when the ships came in. Docker ‘buttons’, which ensured that their wearers were prioritised for any available work, were handed down from father to son, and the livelihoods of entire families were tied to the docks.

However, life was defined by poverty. Work on the docks may have been regular, but it was hard and often dangerous. Food was often scarce. Cyril Deans, who worked as a docker throughout the 1960s, describes his life as a ‘coalie’ – digging out coal from ships – as ‘slavery’, with no security, no pension rights and no avenue for complaint if the shipping company decided to dispute your performance. Before decasualisation, wages were often paid – and spent – in the pub. It was an impoverished life: Cyril’s father, also a docker, often used to get items out of the pawn shop on Monday, only to have them back in by Friday.

Despite its inherent insecurity, dock work was a family trade that passed down through the generations. When it came to getting picked for work, family credentials were more important than academic achievements. As a result, there was no tradition of valuing high education levels, and school drop-out rates were high. By 1997, only 10 percent of young adults in the area stayed at school long enough to sit their Leaving Certificates and a mere 1 percent went on to third-level education.15

When jobs disappear, people follow. As the main sources of employment steadily declined over the second half of the twentieth century, people began to leave: usually those who were young, educated and had a bit of money for a new start. Those who could work moved away, either to another part of Dublin or overseas, leaving behind those that couldn’t. The docklands gradually became a neighbourhood of the elderly, poor and unemployed. Social structures disintegrated. What was once a close-knit community where people lived, worked and socialised within tight boundaries became a fragmented echo of its former self. Community ties were broken and the population declined.16

In the meantime, social policy in Dublin concentrated on suburbanisation, which aimed to tackle the problem of inner city slums by encouraging people to move out of the city. In the 1960s, the new towns of Tallaght, Coolock and Ballymun were developed in order to provide affordable housing and a better standard of living than that in the centre of Dublin. While all hopes were pinned on the outskirts of the city, those left behind suffered from a lack of investment.

With broken community ties, minimal investment and many of those with ambition leaving the area, little remained for the people in the docklands. By the 1980s, the area was an example of the worst of inner-city living: high unemployment, poor health, low education, high drug use and crime. In 1997, unemployment was endemic, standing at more than double the national average. Drug use and crime boomed, and the docklands gained a reputation as a no-go area.17

Urban Dereliction

The economic and social changes of the twentieth century left physical marks on the docklands landscape.

The introduction of roll-on, roll-off freight in the 1950s meant less space was needed for warehousing, and so the Dublin port moved further east, down the Liffey, to its current position. As shipping activity withdrew from the city, it left behind a wave of dereliction along the banks of the river. Because the Liffey cuts straight through the centre of Dublin, environmental and urban degradation along the quays had a stark impact on the city’s appearance.

What’s more, planning policy at the time discouraged private development of derelict sites. The desire to widen the streets along the quays had an unfortunate side-effect: any application for refurbishment in that area would lead to the site’s boundaries being reassessed and its size likely being reduced. Developers were put off, and buildings were left to fall into ruin, with boarded-up doors and broken windows adding to the desolation of the area. Ruari Quinn, who in the mid-1980s was Minister for Labour, remembers the urban blight along the quays as giving the city the appearance of someone with a very bad set of teeth.

Even in its heyday, the area around Grand Canal Dock was far from a green and pleasant land. The geographical boundaries of the Liffey, Grand Canal, the city and the sea meant space was limited, with much-needed housing crammed into narrow roads around Pearse Street and Ringsend, and the Grand Canal Dock area reserved mainly for industry. With the exception of Ringsend Park, which provided an important splash of greenery, open space and recreational amenities were few and far between.18

Grand Canal Dock was one of only two industrial areas in Dublin, the second being the area around the Guinness factory at St James’s Gate. As the economy declined, factories fell quiet, gates were locked, forecourts abandoned and buildings left to crumble. The closed gasworks on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay had left behind a classic brownfield site: abandoned, desolate and neglected. Heavy contamination from years of gas production meant it was very risky for a developer, and no one wanted to touch it.

Unless a ship arrived, the area was quiet. People might visit the old scrap yard at Hammond Lane to make a bit of money but, by the 1980s, the area around Grand Canal Dock was a shadow of its former self. Where once there had been busy factories buzzing with activity, there were now rusty structures standing on land polluted with the by-products of industry that was now a thing of the past. Derelict buildings and patches of wasteland defined the landscape, and much of the area was simply sealed off. A rapid industrial decline combined with a policy of getting people out of the area meant that the docklands quickly became an eyesore.

Housing was also a problem. In the late nineteenth century, cheap housing had been built to accommodate the swelling ranks of workers. Space and budget limitations meant the buildings were simple: one and two-storey terraced houses in narrow streets. Thr...