The Failure of the Liffey Navigation
It is known that a small amount of work was carried out on the River Maigue near Adare after the passing of the 1715 Act, but it was insignificant. A second and much more ambitious undertaking was also started: to make the River Liffey navigable. In October 1723 Stephen Costello appealed to the Irish parliament for financial help. He explained that he was one of the subscribers of a company set up to carry on this work and that he 'proceeded a Good Way in carrying on the Navigation of the River Liffey, and would have near finished the same had he not been disappointed of Money vigorously to carry it on'. A parliamentary committee recommended that the company should be given £2,000 but, at this stage, the scheme collapsed and the company was dissolved. It was suggested that the South Sea Bubble affair 'had crushed some of the Company' but they could scarcely have taken on a more difficult navigation scheme and references to it in contemporary pamphlets suggest that it was not proving very successful. The work was carried out on stretches of the river between Lucan and Leixlip, 'which was rather to give a specimen of Mr C----l-o's Art, (in order to encourage such Undertakings) than anything else; as may appear by the Narrowness of the Locks, and the Channels, as far as he carried it'. The same writer, John Browne, suggested that such undertakings 'in which the general welfare is concerned, are seldom successful unless, either, there be a fund raised by Act of Parliament for carrying them on, or else, proper encouragement given by tolls, to the particular undertakers of the work'. But another anonymous writer stressed the need for adequate security if public money was to be advanced for navigation schemes, adding:
I form my Judgement from what has been attempted on the Liffey, I should as soon hope for subscribers from Moscow as from any Gentlemen in this Kingdom, who may, if they please, know (what many feel) the consequence of going rashly to work.
Another writer in the same year, 1729, also referred to the failure of the scheme:
That Undertaking seemed, for the first two or three years, to be in a very hopeful Way. . . all Men spoke kindly and greatly of it; and hoped still greater things from it, as from an auspicious leading-Card, that was to be the Precedent and Inducement to the like Improvement of our other Rivers throughout the Kingdom. But, how that Favourite Service, so hopeful at its first setting out, comes now to Iye disparaged and neglected; and instead of an Example or Encouragement to be rather a Bar and a stumbling Block to any further Progress in so desirable a Work, is what few Men have been able to comprehend.
The same writer went on to refer to 'Tamperings of Intermedlers and Pretenders to Art at home, as well as of Intruders from abroad, who aided by your own Distractions found Means, first to make themselves necessary as Councellors and Assistants, and by Degrees to work them selves into the whole Management of your Affairs'.
The Irish parliament recognised that the failure of this scheme was acting as a disincentive to private investment in other navigation works and so another Act was passed in 1729 setting up Commissioners of Inland Navigation for each of the four provinces with public funds for carrying on work levied by duties on a wide range of luxury goods: 'Coaches, Berlins, Chariots, Calashes, Chaises and Chairs, and upon Cards and Dice and upon wrought and maufactured Gold and Silver plate'. Canal building had got off to an inauspicious start but it will be seen that this new Act achieved results. In an attempt to satisfy the increasing demand for cheaper coal in Dublin, the Newry Canal was commenced in 1731 to open up access to the Tyrone coalfields with work on an extension from Lough Neagh right into the coalfield area beginning in the following year. Some work was also carried out under the commissioners on the River Boyne and surveys were made of a line for a canal from Dublin to the Shannon. In 1751 parliament extended the appropriation of duties for a further period of twenty-one years and incorporated the provincial commissioners into a single navigation board. In all, by 1755, £89,920 together with £3,200 in grants had been expended on navigation works but, with such limited resources and the reluctance of the private sector to invest, progress was destined to be very slow and, if it had not been for a certain sequence of events, the Irish inland waterway network as we know it today might never have come into being.
The Reign of the Undertakers
The Irish parliament had begun to meet more regularly by the 1740s and to take much more interest in the expenditure of public funds. A constitutional struggle developed between two factions in parliament; one group supported the English administration and the other had a more independent attitude. At that time there was money left in the Irish coffers at the end of each financial year but the Irish parliament had no statutory right to this revenue, which was vested in the Crown. A parliamentary committee revealed that there had been grave misapplication of public funds in the building of barracks. The surveyor general, Arthur Nevill, was held responsible for this but the English administration backed him and this support of a proven perpetrator of irregularities alienated some of the members of parliament. Nevill was eventually dismissed but the damage was already done and those who were against the administration found themselves with a majority in the House. Resenting the Crown's right to the hereditary revenue, this group, who became known as the 'Undertakers', decided that in future there would be no surplus revenue for the King. Commencing in 1755 they voted large sums each session for public works and for the encouragement of industry. Navigation works were an obvious choice at that time and the Commissioners of Inland Navigation, many of whom were members of parliament themselves, were able to obtain large grants for schemes.
Inevitably there were abuses as members sought schemes for their own aggrandisement. The greatest jobbery occurred in the grants for industry but navigation schemes came in for considerable criticism in the years that followed. Sir George Macartney, who had been chief secretary in Ireland at the time, wrote in 1773:
And now, after near twenty years' distribution of the national treasure in this manner, what have been the fruits of it? Intercourse, without com merce; means of conveyance, where there is nothing to convey; coalworks, where turf is still the fuel even of the colliers; harbours, which present shipwreck, instead of safety; bridges impassable and navigations unnavigable.
Richard Griffith, writing in 1795, a little further removed from the time, referred to the 'chance-medly manner in which the whole business was conducted'. He compllted that £592,200 Os 81/~d had been spent by the commissioners between 1730 and 1785 on no less than twenty three different navigation schemes:
Every member had his favourite work, the fund was divided and subdivided into various channels, and at least one third of the whole expended in salaries to officers, whose interest it was to make their place perpetual by retarding the completion of the works, and the remainder in discount for money advanced, and in jobs to contractors whose accounts were never adjusted.... In England canals were the effect of internal wealth, in Ireland an efficient cause of producing or at least as the best means of facilitating these happy effects.
In fact, as the story of each of the waterways unfolds, it will become clear that the greatest waste of money was caused not so much by jobbery but by faulty surveys and the inexperience of the early engineers. That great historian, William Lecky, was nearer the truth in his assessment of the situation:
There was no doubt much corruption, but it is not clear that there was more than in England.... It is, at all events, certain that the great period of political corruption in Ireland was not the period of the Undertakers but that which immediately followed their overthrow. . . much the greater part seems to have been expended on inland navigation and the grants do not appear on the face of them either excessive or misapplied.
The Newry Canal had been completed successfully and the potential of inland navigation became obvious to all. The commissioners had embarked on implementing the grand concept which had been in men's minds for some time: connecting up Ireland's major rivers. In the words of Henry Brooke, writing in 1759, the waterways would be like a giant spider's web enabling Ireland 'to spin her own web of happiness out of her own bowels'. Based on the excavation work on the Grand Canal which had begun at that time, he estimated that it required 3,640,000 cubic yards of excavation to complete that canal to the Shannon and, working on the basis that one man cuts two cubic yards per day, he suggested that twelve such canals should be constructed providing a national navigation system:
and it follows, as surely, that 80,000 of our Idle hands, if employed therein, would in much less than one year, accomplish the Business, and might amuse themselves on the water the Remainder of the Term.
This sort of comment is an indication of the canal mania of the time. One thing is clear, the Undertakers set in motion a programme of canal building in Ireland which was to lay the foundation of the waterway network as we know it today, and there is little doubt that if it had not been for this initial phase many of the works would never have been undertaken.
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