I finished last weeks article with Sidney Minch’s statement to the
Dáil in June 1933 when he lamented the lack of industry in his home town of
Athy which he claimed was suffering hugely from unemployment. The traditional brickyard industry was in its
final years, while the Barrow Drainage Scheme started eight years previously
was no longer providing job opportunities and paying out weekly wage packages
which in the recent past had fuelled the local economy. The men and women of Athy and South Kildare
were for the most part restricted to part-time job opportunities on local
farms. A lucky few worked for Minch
Nortons, while the relatively new Industrial Vehicles Industry factory was a
welcome boost to local employment. The
County Home, as St. Vincent’s Hospital was then known, had not at that stage
developed the potential for female employment which it has enjoyed for the past
40 years or so.
In 1936 Bill Norton who was first elected to the Dáil for the County
Dublin constituency for a brief period in 1927, spoke in the Dáil on
unemployment in his new constituency of Kildare to which he had been elected in
February 1932. Condemning the low level
of unemployment assistance of 12/6 a week then available to a married man with
five children, he claimed families in Athy “have
recently been taken out of slums and transferred to new Council houses and
asked to pay 3/10 per week for rent out of their weekly allowance of 12/6. At the same time bread cost 6 pence and
butter 1/4 pence a pound”. Norton had no hesitation in realising “that the plight of that unfortunate family
which was to provide food, clothing, fuel and light and all other items of
domestic expenditure for seven persons out of the sum of 8/8 per week reveals
a picture of the most harrowing
poverty.”
The unemployment situation was so grave that a local branch of the
Federation of Unemployed was set up in Athy and when the Minister for Finance
visited the town in June 1935 it’s members met with the Minister to press for
an increase in unemployment assistance which they claimed “did not protect unemployed workers and their families from hunger and
from the grossest form of malnutrition”.
Norton, who prior to becoming a TD was a rural workers union secretary
joined the fray with a Dáil deputy who
when interrupting Norton had claimed “Athy
is surely a very prosperous town”. Bill
Norton who more than any other Dáil deputy was familiar with conditions in Athy
retorted “if prosperity is to be measured
in terms of people being ragged and hungry and trying to live on 12/6 a week and paying 4/= a week rent out of
that, of people clambering for relief schemes and protesting against having to
work on degrading rotational schemes, then Athy has reached the hallmark of
prosperity”.
The seeds of the future industrial success which Athy would enjoy up
to the 1970’s had been laid down with the opening up of the Industrial Vehicle
Factory in 1929. However, it was the
coming of the Asbestos Cement Company to Athy in 1937 which was the turning
point in the town’s economic fortunes.
The passing of the Cement Act in 1933 cleared the way for the setting up
of the Irish Cement Industry. Matthew P.
Minch, Managing Director of Minch Nortons, disappointed at the failure to
secure the sugar factory for Athy met with H.A.N. Osterberg, a businessman from
Denmark who was interested in securing a stake in the new Irish cement
industry. Minch encouraged the Dane to
set up a factory in Athy which was serviced by road, rail and Canal and where a
large workforce was readily available.
The factory was built in Mullery’s field and incorporated the site of
the canal side houses which were demolished under Athy’s slum clearance programme. Opened in May 1937 by the Minister for
Industry and Commerce, Sean Lemass, the asbestos cement factory flourished
despite some early difficulties caused by strikes and a downturn in business
resulting in let offs. The factory soon
became the biggest employer in the town and helped enormously to relieve the
chronic unemployment which had beset the town for decades. An indication of its beneficial effect on
employment in Athy can be gauged from the live register numbers which in July
1935 were 512 and 203 in October 1936.
The war years were very difficult for the asbestos factory with
cement shortages which caused huge problems for the construction industry and
resulted in a fall off in demand for the factory’s products. Another affect of the restriction on the
supply of cement arose in the summer of 1944 when work on the building of a new
cinema in Offaly Street was stopped. As
a young lad I remember walking on the unfinished walls of the building which
had been raised to about five feet high before work ceased and never
restarted. The cinema site eventually
became part of Beech Grove. An
interesting development in 1946 after the war ended was the use by housing
contractors of asbestos produced in the Athy Factory for producing what was
disparagingly referred in Dáil as “the
Athy type house”. This was described
by one disgruntled T.D. as a “lean-to
with an asbestos roof, a cold, miserable house which a contractor in Wexford
suggested to the County Council could be built for three hundred and seventy
pounds”.
Industrial Vehicles Limited which Captain Hosie had started in the
Pound field in 1929 to produce agricultural implements including the
“universal” tractor trailer opened a foundry in 1935 to make cast iron
components. The development of the
foundry and the disposal of the motor and agricultural departments of the
business in 1956 led to a change of name to I.V.I. Foundry Limited. The foundry business prospered and gave
regular employment over many decades to hundreds of Athy men who could be
easily identified each evening by their soot laden faces as they walked or
cycled home from the foundry.
Just four years after Industrial Vehicles started up, another local
factory was built on the site of the old brick company premises at
Barrowford. A number of Irish
businessmen intended to use surplus straw, which they believed was readily
available in and around Athy, to make wallboard under the brand name “Lignatex”. The machinery for the new factory was ordered
from Sweden but with the outbreak of war in 1939 the machinery could not be
sent to Ireland. It was not until
1946/’47 that the machinery arrived and was assembled on site. However, before production could start the
straw accumulated at Barrowford was set alight and caused the largest fire ever
seen in this area. The “Lignatex” board eventually started
coming off the assembly line in 1949.
However within a few years the factory experienced difficulty in
obtaining sufficient straw to maintain production and the manufacture of
Wallboard from straw ceased. The factory
instead used the thinnings from Irish forests drawn from all over the
country. By 1956 the factory had reached
a stage where production of wallboard was far outstripping its sale and
production was building up. Bowaters, an
international organisation, was brought into the operation and within two
years, utilising its existing and new market contacts, the wallboard factory
was able to increase its production capacity.
At its peak the factory employed upwards of 250 local men and women.
The wallboard factory experienced difficulties in the 1970’s, as did
a number of other timber processing plants including Munster Chip Board in
Waterford and Scarriff and Clondalkin Papermills. They all received financial assistance from
state agencies but the end for the Wallboard factory came in December 1978 with
the loss of over 120 jobs.
Established in the 1940’s were two other local industries, both of
which are still in operation today. The
Bord na Mona factory in Kilberry opened in 1945 producing bales of peat moss
and gave employment for both permanent and seasonal staff. Batchelors, located in an old malthouse at
Rathstewart, opened its pea factory in 1941 and over the years gave employment
to mostly female workers. A substantial
part of the Athy process ceased in 1947, resulting in many redundancies but in
the early 1960’s further investment in the Athy plant lead to the re-emergence
of Bachelor’s as a thriving industry which continues to this day.
The Wallboard factory, the asbestos factory and to a lessor extent
the IVI Foundry, Minch Nortons, Batchelors and Bord na Mona were the main
providers of industrial employment in Athy during the 1950’s and 60’s. Of these only Tegral, a new name for the
former asbestos factory, and to a lesser extent Batchelors, Bord na Mona, and
Minch Nortons continue to operate. The
Wallboard factory closed in 1977 and fifteen years later the I.V.I. Foundry
closed its doors with the loss of 120 jobs.
Minch Nortons have in recent years quite dramatically reduced its
workforce as a result of improved mechanisation. Tegral Building Products and its sister
company Tegral Metal Holdings both of which have plants on the old asbestos
factory site continue to be successful local industrial ventures. Several other industries all offering important
and much valued job opportunities have come and gone since the 1970’s. Athy, which once boasted a larger industrial
base than many other comparable Irish provincial towns, has suffered from a
continuing failure to attract industrial development on the scale of the
asbestos and wallboard factories.
The population of Athy is increasing at a very fast rate, boosted by
comparatively low cost private housing schemes which have increased the town’s
housing stock almost twofold in recent years.
This has placed an enormous strain on the town’s existing infrastructure
and a sustained programme of improvement and development of its infrastructure
will have to be put in place if Athy is ever again to become a major centre of
industrial employment.
