Ireland's Inland Waterways - The Fall of the Undertakers

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The Fall of the Undertakers

The financial bonanza was shortlived. The English administration used the accusations of jobbery to discredit the spending spree and by 1767 the Castle administrators had brought about the fall of the Undertakers and reimposed control over public expenditure. By this time Ireland had an annual deficit instead of surplus revenue and the question was what to do with all the incomplete navigations. In England there had been little government intervention in canal building; canals had been built to service industry which was already there. In Ireland public confidence did slowly increase in this new means of transport which was supposed to lead the country into the new Industrial Age. The government encouraged private companies to take over the partly com pleted navigations and substantial sums were subscribed which were vast by the standards of private enterprise in Ireland at that time. Arthur Young, the English writer, visiting Ireland in the 1770s warned: 'Have something to carry before you seek the means of carriage'. His warning was to prove very accurate. The Irish waterways failed to generate industry; the anticipated Industrial Revolution did not cross the Irish Sea.
In 1787, following an inquiry into their financial affairs, the Commissioners of Inland Navigation were dissolved and the navigations which were still in their charge were transferred to local bodies. Forced to rely on the meagre income from tolls on the incomplete navigations, these bodies did little in the closing years of the century. In 1789 a debenture scheme was introduced to give financial help to private companies. Loans at four per cent of up to one third of the cost of construction work were made available but proper accounts had to be submitted to the Commissioners of Imprest Accounts showing that the money had been expended before each instalment of the loan was issued. In 1800 the Irish parliament carried out an inquiry into inland navi gation and it became obvious that a further injection of public funds was needed. In its dying moments, before its Union with Westminster, the Irish parliament appointed five Directors General of Inland Navi gation with a fund of up to £500,000 at their disposal. For the next thirty years it was this body which controlled waterway development in Ireland.

The Directors General of Inland Navigation
William Parnell, writing in 1804 in his Inquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents in Ireland remarked: 'The surrender of political rights to a foreign power for the sake of improving domestic govern ment, calls to mind the Pelew islanders, who jump into the sea to shelter themselves from a shower of rain'. There is no doubt that Ireland's domestic affairs were neglected as a result of the Union. The Westminster parliament adopted a policy of leaving well alone as long as the administrators in Dublin Castle preserved tranquillity in Ireland and built up the defences of the country. One Englishman, John Gough, who visited Ireland in 1813-4 remarked: 'Ireland is a country that Englishmen in general know less about, than they do about Russia, Siberia and the country of the Hottentots'. If was considered that the waterways had been well taken care of, a large fund had been allocated to them and it was up to the Directors General to get on with it as they thought fit.

In their wisdom, the Directors General saw it as part of their role to try to standardise tolls at as low a rate as possible and they adopted a policy of forcing companies to reduce tolls in return for financial assistance. This proved very shortsighted because it forced the com panies to operate uneconomically which in turn led to a deterioriation in the maintenance of the waterways. The Canal Age had introduced a much cheaper form of transport into the country. In the 1790s the average cost per mile of carriage of goods by road was 1s. The early canal company charters allowed them to charge up to 3d per ton per mile and 2d per ton per lock. The lockage charge was found to be too cumbersome to operate and was soon dropped but the mileage charge was not increased. The Directors General sought to impose even lower tolls: 2d on general goods and 1d on corn, grain, meal, malt, flour, potatoes, lime, sand, fuel, manure, iron and military equipment.

Negotiations between the Directors General and canal companies always seemed to be very protracted, which led to much frustration; matters were conducted through lengthy correspondence and no effort was made to sit down together to discuss them. Over the years, more than one quarter of the funds was swallowed up in the running of the establishment. The chairman was paid a salary of £738 9s 4d and each of the other four Directors General £461 1 ls 9d. The first chairman, the Hon. Sackville Hamilton, fancied himself as an inventor and nearly £1,000 was wasted on his 'shoal scrubber' for preventing the accumulation of sand banks in Dublin Bay: from the operation of which the sands of the Bar may be removed by the Winds and Currents. . . a Boat or Vessel of so buoyant a Form as to be easily moved by the Undulations of the Sea, with strong iron framework supporting loose poles with a Scrubber on each of a spherical form shod and pointed with iron. Most of the navigation establishments were very small but a larger concern like the Grand Canal Company had as many as 160 on its payroll in 1810. Tolls were collected at the loading places by toll collectors or agents but sometimes by the lockkeepers. Each boat was 'weighed' when it went into service: it was gradually loaded in con trolled conditions and its 'depth sheet' was filled in, indicating the reading on the depth gauge on the bow of the boat as each additional ton was added. The boatmaster had to carry his depth sheet at all times together with a manifest of the weight and destination of his cargo. Legislation, which was not changed until 1845, precluded canal companies from acting as carriers on their own canals but they were allowed to operate passenger services.

In the first decade of the nineteenth century the war with Napoleon gave a temporary boost to the Irish economy and the canal companies shared this boom. Then the country gradually sank into a period of depression; unrest and unemployment grew and while politicians, administrators and economists argued about what should be done, the distress of a large section of the population increased. Many questioned whether it was good policy to fund public works just to give employment; the laissez-faire doctrine operating so successfully in England dominated thinking. Edward Wakefield, writing in 1812, typifies this:

If this be a sufficient reason for cutting canals, when is the labour to cease? If the object be to prevent idleness and all its consequent evils, the same might be effected by filling them up again, or conveying the produce of Ireland from one place to another in wheelbarrows; the fact is that cutting canals is not a regular, permanent and profitable employment. lt is charac teristic of the Irish to cut a canal in the expectation of trade rather than to wait till trade demands it.

For the many unemployed and their families conditions worsened, aggravated by bad harvests in 1816 and 1817 with the consequent spread of fever. The people's plight gradually became known from descriptions of travellers and reports of parliamentary inquiries. The granting of debentures to assist navigation works had ceased in 1800 with the establishment of the Directors General. Now, new loan schemes were introduced to encourage all types of public works but at first the repayment terms were so stringent that fews companies could avail of them. These terms were relaxed in the early 1820s as conditions in the country worsened, but no attempt was made to set up adequate administrative machinery to co-ordinate and control the funds. The navigation board had by this time become a very ineffectual body and it failed to avail of the opportunity to encourage navigation works.

Eventually, in 1831, legislation was passed setting up Commission ers for Public Works to take over the functions of a number of boards including the navigation board. The new commissioners were to embark on navigation and drainage works to provide employment but, ironically, by the time some of the works were in hand, emigration and famine had so reduced the workforce that it became difficult to find labourers. These new navigation works coincided with the start of the Railway Age in Ireland which was to have such a disastrous effect on the waterways.

It will be seen in the chapters that follow that most of the waterways facing into the 1830s had reached a relatively improved position. Given the low density of industrial activity and the concentration of that activity on the coastal towns, it was inevitable that traffic on the water ways would remain low. They were doomed to low profitability, and matters were made worse by the high capital costs of their construction and mismanagement. However, the traffic carried was far from in significant in relative terms and the waterways did make a large con tribution to the expansion of inland trade by considerably reducing transport costs. By the early 1830s some 500,000 tons per year were being carried by water, which represents a high proportion of the total inland trade of the country at that time but, to set this figure in perspective, a similar tonnage was being carried on the Oxford Canal alone in England at that time. The success or otherwise of navigations was determined by the economic environment in which they operated.

The towns and communities which lay along the path of the water ways enjoyed a new prosperity in the first half of the nineteenth century; some of them, like Tullamore, became important market and distribution centres. Then the railway companies arrived to compete for the limited trade and succeded only in preventing the waterways from prospering without securing financial stability for themselves; towns by-passed by the railways and exclusively dependent on inland navigation fared badly. But history was to show that the aspirations of the new railway entrepreneurs were no less inflated than those of the canal builders before them.

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