Midlands Correspondent
The building of the original Shannonbridge Power Station in Co Offaly in the early 1960s was the third major development undertaken in the midlands as part of the then government s vision for not only creating employment in the region but dealing with an international oil crisis.
Authors Owen Denneny and John P Larkin, in their book A Path Through the Bog , published in 1995, said the late taoiseach Sean Lemass saw a solution that would resolve both the fuel and the job crisis.
It was with this in mind that he had appointed a Board of Directors with Todd Andrews as Managing Director of Bord na Móna over ten years previously. Their brief was to produce sufficient turf to supply Dublin with alternative fuel to substitute for coal, which we could no longer import, due to the war. They called this board, The Turf Development Board , and it would later extend to other counties, Larkin and Denneny wrote.