Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie

Patrick Bresnihan (he/him) is Lecturer in the Department of Geography at Maynooth University. He works across the interdisciplinary fields of political ecology, science and technology studies, and environmental humanities. His research focuses on different but related concerns around water, energy, land, and infrastructure in Ireland. He has published extensively, including articles on the new extractive frontiers of wind and data in Ireland, urban commons in post-crash Dublin, and the poetics of John Clare. His book, Transforming the Fisheries: Neoliberalism, Nature and the Commons (2016), won the Geography Society of Ireland Book of the Year in 2018. 

Patrick Brodie (he/him) is a media scholar and FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He received his PhD at Concordia University. His in-progress book manuscript, Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland, analyzes the cultural politics and spatial development of media infrastructure in post-financial crisis Ireland. His current research focuses on the environmental politics of media and energy infrastructures, specifically across the borders of Ireland. His research has appeared and is forthcoming in Media, Culture and Society, New Media and Society, Information, Communication and Society, Culture Machine, Canadian Journal of Communication, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, States of Entanglement: Data in the Irish Landscape (Actar), and Ecological Reparation: Repair, Remediation and Resurgence in Social and Environmental Conflict (Bristol University Press), among other venues. He is a member of the Grierson Research Group and the Global Emergent Media Lab. 

Title and abstract:

Energized Mediation at Marconi’s Connemara Station 

Ireland’s histories of colonialism, modernity, and industry are intertwined through a pervasive rural/urban divide, which has long informed ideas of “uneven development” in the country. However, discourses of rural Ireland’s uneven industrialization, while important, have frequently excluded the importance of rural spaces to the country’s infrastructural development, from transport, to energy, to telecommunication. Ireland’s energy-intensive modernity, the development of which straddled the British colonial period and the postcolonial era, was a patchwork affair through which areas of the country were differentially enrolled into state programs and strategies on either side of the historical juncture of colonialism/postcolonialism.  

In this paper, we will unravel the history of Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless station in Clifden, on the west coast of Ireland, which operated from 1907-1922, and was paired with another station across the Atlantic in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. His Clifden station, powered by peat extracted from the surrounding bogland landscape in Connemara, was one of several important telecommunications sites established on the west coast of Ireland to connect to Canada and the US. The images used to describe the site are striking – locals described sparks flying from the 210-foot-high wooden masts relaying signals across the Atlantic, smoke billowing from the energy generators, a small railroad for steam engines the only route to the inaccessible site near the coast. We will confront and problematize the idea and imagination of Marconi as a “pioneer” who set up his stations in “remote” locations across the world to produce his ”wireless” empire by analyzing the Connemara station’s entanglement’s with Ireland’s colonial/postcolonial infrastructural and energy modernity. We will use the station to draw out the history and the coexistence of over- and under-development which characterizes Ireland’s industrial landscape, or, to use the words of writer Mike McCormack, to see “the west of Ireland as a science fiction landscape” and all that implies.