On the 5th of November, 1946, exactly 70 years ago, six men walked into a field in North County, Dublin. They dug a hole and planted a pole. It marked a promise to bring electricity to every home in Ireland. This was a time when Ayman DeLara was articulate and Europe was rebuilding after World War Two, but almost two million people in rural Ireland still had no electricity.

This poll was going to change all that. On the electricity supply board are the ESB, as we now know, it was founded in 1927. Cities and major towns got power, but it took decades for rural Ireland to light up.

In 1946, one of the most important pieces of our national planning was put under way when work was begun on rural electrification in 1946, a plan was unveiled to connect 400000 homes.

It was called the Rural Electrification Scheme. And the poll in this particular field is where it all started.

Kiltartan was the first area to be connected and I think the parochial house maybe got electricity before McCullough's pub.

I'm with Brendan Delaney, heritage manager with the ESB. He's found the original Paul Lying forgotten in the long grass.

It's the equivalent to an art collector coming across a painting by a famous artist.

Rural Ireland in the 1940s was a dimly lit world of emigration and farming.

So these poles signalled the arrival of a whole new world.

The big thing from the beginning was that they weren't just selling appliances. They were selling a lifestyle. There was then the future, really.

There's a mall shooting.

It was the biggest project in the history of the state. It took three decades, over one million poles and 75000 miles of cable. They called it the quiet revolution, and it took the brains and brawn of thousands of men to build the network.

But electricity changed the lives of women in rural Ireland forever.

Women's work was very, very hard in those days, like electricity really was the women's liberation movement.

The Irish government needed electricity to drive the economy, but to support the miles of cable, the ESB needed a forest of poles.

In Dublin, Miranda Conroy's father, Peter, was in charge of shipping the polls, and my mother used to hold dinner parties for all these captains when I was a child or whatever. Oh, you know, cut to Neverland and is coming for dinner with his wife or somebody else, like a captain in Cartela. But these are really exotic names. And our and I would be OK, EarlyBird, the Finns are coming, you know, off the fence now, whether it be John Finn for such and such.

And I know this is a Finnish sea captain bringing clothes for the ESB, for the rural electrification scheme.

Landing the poles in remote harbors like the inner shorn peninsula in Donegal was a huge challenge. They got to decide on three small, very small, isolated appears to which intuits would bring modest numbers of poles does start. He worked with the ESB for 40 years and the Cotton Ramattan 500 people turned up. And in my own head, the locals still talk about the fascination people had there. And the young people like Philip Larkin and Mary McGlothlin, they spent all of the day that the steamer was right down looking, was all on the deliveries, the uses of the slings and cranes that were on the boat to to deliver to the north of the pier.

Before the polls were planted, the country was divided into 792 districts. Then they were canvassed for customers. Initially, the ESB chose to connect one part of every county priority was given to areas that would bring the most revenue. Then it was up to surveyors like Noel Mulcahey in North Korea to cut the lines into the landscape.

What you had, of course, the family or two fellows working for field cutting holes in the hedges so you could see through the Adelaide. And with slashers, you know, you have to lay out the backbone, right? It's supposed to be dead straight and you're working off maps and you marking off about 80 metres from pole to pole. And sometimes the maps were inaccurate. And on the other occasion, I'd be looking through I see a bloody house in front of sedges that's not supposed to be there at all.

What am I going to do now? And they got into me that if you had to hit an angle that angles cost money, you know, and so on. So I remember going to bed at night and, you know, perspiring about making a bad job of this because I wasn't able to get the thing that straight.

You know, you'd think only a mountain or a house could change the course of an electricity line. But there were other barriers as awkward to get around.

Dubliner Tony Suttle remembers linesman being diverted by superstition, a linesman at the instruction to the engineer would go to plant a pole in a particular spot in the field to be told by the owner of the land to do no, absolutely no way quadripolar be put there.

That was a very rough or a fairy bush mind of my ancestors came over my native tongue to feed the cow here, he said, to pay for playing and all other men dancing around that tree.

No, because they said if I went back to them, getting together with the porters spending and as often as not, my father said the pole would have to be moved slightly to one side of the other to facilitate this strong, strong belief.

Across the country, gangs of women were climbing poles and stringing cable from Enniskillen to Enniscorthy. Work was underway in Koolade County Cork. The work inspired this ballad. It's sung by Danny Sullivan. Journeyed here.

And did you hear what Alan never said? That they speak with electricity, have landed in Coola to dry. That was true by then way. It was a Holly Shaw or Janet here. If we had them here some 50 years ago going to work like that truck had canvas for the man at the back.

You know, this is Daniel Duffy. He's 83 and from Letterkenny, he worked with the Pole Gang in Rathbone in Donegal at four o'clock on the half way and not like this.

Who was on that?

You know, but the front door was open because he had to be open for that four year post polls. So, you know, it used to be fierce and the cold morning in the back, a lot of content. You had to dig one hole.

cipherText. Each day, and for Fortum, another whole dog, that was one day and then the pole had become like, you understand, like it, and there'd be allocated to pick and shovel and a crowbar.

And and it generally cycled out of those holes and the that hide the tools in the ditch.

And the next morning, you know, Joe Sullivan was with a gang in Karlo. It was a six year job to link the county from Tehn Island to Castle Warren.

But the guys had come along to manually lift it and did that pull up, get their shoulder underneath it to be dirty.

And that needed fresh creosote and everything.

And a couple of them would get there first opened and the trestle at the end of the truck on the top, and then three or four of them would just say, Harstad up under three Manuelita, you know, OK, make it up.

OK, back it up.

And then we weren't able to do that. Remember there were a foreman from Reffo of this band that I was only able to do one hole, you know, and he just came by as if you can a speedy but for them on Almeda we were so far on you say yes. From the start we were so far on deck, the holes in the bolts up.

I'll need a motor bike back down the lower down the bottom end of the country.

In Ross Kaveri in County Cork, there was a story about a pony. This is told by Chris O'Neil and it's become the stuff of legend.

We get a order because we'd have to order these ports in the poor seat. And when he'd bring the Paul onto location, what was being done? He gave back about 10 feet and he went to near the hall and the pony slipped into the hole. And Paddy Crosby used to have a program on Sunday night with kids. And one question you asked was, can you tell me about the incident and this young lady anywhere said he was on his way home from school one day and he just saw this horse fall into a hole and united and shot the horse.

But Paddy Cosby asked the question and he said they shot the horse in the hall. And Yungas said, oh, no, sorry. They shot the horse made in 1948, just 2000 premises had electricity.

Some homes were dead against signing, but slowly parishes were lighting up.

We are here tonight celebrating our most important.

Pancha in Tipperary was one of the first for the Polish banker the night we intend to switch on the lights for this village.

The ceremony attracted dignitaries and even radio. Even local priest Canon Hayes threw the switch to wild celebrations. It was a scene that would play out all over the country. And here goes in the name of God.

Before long, the conviction rate reached 11000, and by the early 50s, this had surged to 60000, outside influences started leaking into popular culture and in the wet ditches of North Korea.

And Limerick No. Mulcahey was singing a song of the day.

And what we whenever it rained, we drove into a ditch and we sang.

I don't mind riding out one dark and windy day on a la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la.

And I've heard it from. The FBI again goes to.

It wasn't just cowboy songs that were rising from the ditches, sometimes it was operatic arias, we do a bit of horn to play a song Hot Dog for my birthday.

They go for a love song called This would be coming out of the head, you know, so that these were the kind of bad things that went on typically pull men like Tim Sloven were well treated when they arrived in town.

And how did people treat you then locally where they delighted to see you?

Maybe not to use it, but it was also new to people.

But there was God like fear, not delite witnessed the day his gang planted polls in Kelkar in Donegal.

So we're having the tea this day. We were asked to put polls on and three said really, we ought to take her. We were delighted with it. And she says, you're very welcome.

But she says, I've been sad because she says, do you know anything about Ted Cullom kills prophecy? No, sir, I do not. Well, it's in the prophecy that the trees without branches covered near the end of the world. And we had put up a line of poles up by her house along. And she says, unfortunately says the prophecy seems to be coming true. She says there's the trees without prejudice.

Tim's gang were keeping pace with the work and moving from town to town. But it wasn't just electrical connections that were made. Sometimes sparks flew when they moved into new digs.

I think I was about 16 years of age, believe it or not.

Tina Sloven remembers a ragtag bunch arriving on our doorstep.

And I said, no, we're not taking anyone else that says no more.

She didn't want to take me in. She was the oldest of the family. And she sort of said to the mother, it's not for God sake, don't take it. And these fellas, the guy that was with them said, please, please take me to stockade three or four. And I was one of them.

Yeah, I was only in secondary school at the time and whatever. And I think she felt for me.

But, you know, two women in the house and the only one and the old one to push it, they're taking there's great jobs and great bonding because nobody had money and nobody was working. And I oh, started from there.

And thank God that has lasted so long and we're still together.

The Rural Dance Hall was still the best chance of romance. However, I know under glitter ball lights, the nights grew longer and the hemlines shorter. Women were wearing beehive hairstyles and men used Brylcreem to sculpt. The docs ask quiffs. And they were extremely well got with the locals, they were all young, physically fit young men.

According to Des Dati, being an ESB woman had its own attractions.

So the the dancers in the area took on a whole new meaning. When you had these E.S.P guys, many other locals had to resort to pretending they were E.S.P gays in order to do as well as these strangers. The woman is still going strong.

Patricia Darte is her name right now, of course, to another ex-husband. So she was telling me that about herself as a 16 year old for her first dance and Kinuko and and he was a great dancer and said he was working with the bringing the light to the area. And she was delighted with that. That was an extra bonus for her. But her sister took her home away from this guy. And and the next Monday, she was turned on at the fair and was amazed to find the same guy at the top of Brid Street directing the traffic.

He was a guard, not only a speed man, but he thought he would do better by claiming to be an ESB rural pioneer. Orchestras were turned into show bands and performers like the Kliper, Kolten began using amplifiers and guitars to cover jukebox hits.

Well, you asked me to together and I tell you, yes, we're going up.

In 1954, ESB celebrated their 100000 rural customer, Ballona Moult Creamery in country Waterford for electricity was bringing changes and new people to town.

Brody O'Connor is 91. She's from Khlong Burning Golway and will always remember one of these newcomers.

We we knew there were strangers in town kind of thing, and one chap in particular, talk to me more of the counter because they have a drink at the bar. And one day he called in and said he'd like to take me out to the cinema. And from there, a romantic sort of stunt started.

And it was a very nice blow, very ordinary, I told not handsome, but reliable.

And he'd tell you down there because it was quite old.

And I thought, well, you'll have to come down on your knees. I thought we'd have a joke like that. But he was just a big, gentle giant. I wouldn't I never at the looks, didn't the looks didn't strike me at all because to me he was it was lovely.

So it was a big padded looking fellow, you know, it was the ones that I met who were good looking like my husband when were cocky and went near his nose at all. And the time came, of course, when they had to move away. And the job done when one day these two girls walked into a little shop. I had started to say that they were friendly with this chap, Ben Jones, and that they had gone to football matches with.

And then this girl liked him very much. So of course, that's got my girls.

And I was very annoyed. So but I did get on to him and I was quite annoyed that I was faithful. And I felt maybe so he assured me and he came immediately to go round the bus and tried very, very hard. But of course, I was up in the air and I wanted to call this thing off. And then I had afterwards to emigrate to America when the job was finished. But I knew that I liked him and I regretted it.

So I think that's the story of my love story. And it wasn't a failure after girls. And I do feel that I was unfair to it and that I did the injustice. He knew that. And he went to America.

I suppose she never laid eyes on Bill again. Most of Brody's generation have a story to tell, even our president, Michael D Higgins, I was five in nineteen forty six when we went to Valley Car in Iraq in Fairfax County.

Clare and I do remember the priest and Sunday giving us at the end of his sermon say the electric is coming again. So he said, this is your last year last chance and they'll be calling into your houses. So you had better say yes, I remember the package was that you you had to sign up to having at least one block and two bulbs. So the work day off of the installation went on itself. And anyone who was a qualified electrician and those who were not indeed were involved as well began putting in sacred heart lamps over and over in Ireland before electricity homes were lit by oil lamps, water was drawn from wells and cooking was done on fires.

And Rangers' know the future was offering Bulb's pumps and cookers in the Senate in 1945. Sean Limus, who was then the Minister for Industry and Commerce, said he hoped for a day when a marriage proposal would rest on the number of electrical appliances and the number of QoS a farmer could provide.

Maria McKale explains the big thing from the beginning was that they weren't just selling appliances, they were selling a lifestyle.

There was some the future really, they really had a grand vision of Ireland and they really believed in rural electrification as a way of stemming the flow from the land, you know, countering immigration, things like that.

And they invested very heavily in sales techniques.

When the digging in the pole planting was done, the ESB sent out its sales teams. And instructors known as demonstrator's made home visits in the big thing really was to get people to put plugs into the house and not just the light, because the thing with the rural electrification scheme was they wanted to create the demand within consumers.

They wanted to make the Lord economically viable, to talk about going in and trying to talk to the woman and the house on her own first so that they be able to advise the appliances to go in and then going around and trying to persuade the farmer.

Then after that, and there's a few references and some of the the research I came across to, the women would have liked to buy more things, but they didn't have control of the purse strings.

Delo Collier was a demonstrator. Every every appliance that was sold, people were offered at the service of a demonstration call Toccata. And so we would go out to the house and meet the sign to make sure that they were quite happy with the way it was installed and the way it was working. And if they had any queries or questions, we would deal with them. It was a very glamorous position. People don't realize that it was being a demonstration for the E.S.P was in its day even more glamorous than being an Air Lingus hostess at the horror that you hoped wouldn't happen was that somebody would have difficulty making brown bread in an electric cooker even in the city, and that it wouldn't be exactly the way it was when they had it in the range and so forth.

And you might have to go out and actually bake bread in their cocoa and make sure that it didn't come out the way that they wanted it. You know, it was one of the things that I used to dread anyway, having to go back and brown bread in the house. And sometimes people would be a little bit annoyed when you succeeded because you had somehow proved them wrong. So you had to be kind of a bit diplomatic. But how you got your way out of that one.

And then there was the development of the Spinderella. No, that that it was great fun because they were like Sputnik's. They were going at 3000, dressed for a minute or so. But they the Sputnik was a little round top and we used to call them Sputnik's when they were you could buy an individual spin dryer or you could buy a twin twin to.

These dryers were launched at the same time as the Sputnik satellite. It was 1957.

Today, a new moon is in the sky, a 23 inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket 500 miles up the artificial moon is boosted to a speed, counterbalancing the pull of gravity and released.

You are hearing the actual signals transmitted by the earth circling satellite, one of the great scientific feats of the age. The ESB were pushing for 200000 connections. There were strange devices spinning in space and out of control. Tumble dryers, Sputnik and the Cold War coincided with electricity.

I was born during rural electrification. And remember the leaflets telling everyone what to do in the case of nuclear fallout? I can still see that leaflet hanging there beside the fuse board when we knelt for the rosary and prayed for the conversion of Russia. There was a lot of fear around electricity at the time.

And some of the women that I interviewed, they talked about, you know, they had to stand on a rubber mat and they were nervous of the electricity standard rubber macduffie Occoquan. Or if you were near any electrical appliances, you know, a lot of people didn't understand us.

So really, the iron, the kettle, the radio, there were safe ways of introducing electricity into the home. But a lot of that relates back to I mean, from what I could see, an unwavering belief that electrification was vital, you know, for the country, for the well-being, to try and progress Ireland into a modern economy.

In a hole in Jordan, Tipperary, locals are sharing stories about rural electrification. One woman remembers how electricity changed the farming work day.

My father. My memory of us in the summertime, all the jobs wouldn't be finished and the had the milking everything and squash just seven. And my father would come in for that 15 minutes to hear The Archers.

Now, I mean, totally different culture, yet was farming community, rural England and the problems they had and the things that they reenacted were the same. And I'm old and my mother would want to get that work finished, but she would listen to the answers in the wintertime. They'd be in my quarter to seven.

It wasn't that long since the war of independence, but this British soap was unmissable. Electricity extended the day and lighten the load, unlike the Archers, the ESB were teaching new farm practices, the infrared lamp.

So the whole problem of providing warmth at a reasonable cost for the rearing and fattening a pig and poultry farming to ideal conditions for capturing and rearing can be created at the turn of a switch from sacred heart lamps to infrared lamps.

New lights were shining across the land.

I remember at home we used to have a thousand bunnies and the mortality rate just be terrible with bunnies because the day we called, no matter what drawer or bedding or no matter how we had tried to keep them warm, frosty, come and get frostbitten and die. I remember the biggest God rest him to our past rugby down from Portabella. He brought the wires and we put them on top of the pole into the shed. But infrared lights over the span of that thin enough because the heat and the light was hugely important and made an enormous difference to us.

You know, at that time, day old chicks would be sitting on the bus all around the country and so forth, and people hatching and people doing things like hatcheries and so forth. They used electricity very early on, I think, in relations. But in relation to its widespread usage, I think it was quite slow in the farmyards. But then, of course, in the farmyards, elimination would go on to eliminate so much drudgery.

By 1960, more than a quarter of a million new connections had been made. No electricity was powering television sets in Irish sitting rooms. I remember a story about two brothers and a sister and an artist of 62, and Charles Mitchell would have been one of the newsreaders. And these two people, two men worked in a farm and the sister looked after the house. But when it came to the nine o'clock news, the bodies would have changed. Clothes have a cold wash.

Cheaper, honorable clothes that have television wouldn't be turned on until they were ready, because as far as they were concerned, Clarence Mitchell could see that TV had arrived.

But the dunstall had become an even bigger part of Irish life.

Her hair is so often her. In 1962, Elvis scored the first official Irish number one hit and counties Covenant Kilkenny were connected up.

In 1963, the counties of Roscommon and Sligo were completed in the dole Charles J. How proposed the abolition of the death penalty?

But the biggest news story was abroad.

And so on and on and on. The final chapter.

They are a group of young people in two decades, electricity had transformed the nation, priests were still preaching the benefits of electricity from the pulpit, but there were feeling the heat from Peter Conroy's back garden and a Finnish sauna arrived on one of the ships.

So Peter Conroy is having a sauna erected in God's time so that these ships captains are coming out to make sure everything was done properly. And so anyway, the sun goes up. It's amazing. But the biggest interest was expressed by the neighbors because nobody knew what a sauna was. And my parents received a visit from the local priest one day to say that some neighbors were very concerned that there was a wooden house in their backyard and an elderly couple on a small child were cavorting.

My father brought the priest and he said, come and have a look. And this is just explained. It sounds it went away, but there was always a kind of a nudity in Ireland, not a runner. It was exquisite.

By 1965, more than 80 percent of rural Ireland had electricity. By 1969, in excess of 300000 new rural premises had been connected at the same time in America, NASA was getting ready to send a man to the moon to run.

But remote areas of Ireland were still without electricity. The Black Valley in Kerry, in the shadow of the McGillicuddy reeks was amongst them. Brendan Delaney, the man who found that first poll into Sallyanne, remembers the finish.

The terrain was particularly rocky and marshy in various places, but it was a logistics effort. No. There was also the whole question in the Black Valley of where the network would be sited. So 400 poles were used to supply 39 customers. But E.S.P put a huge amount of effort and thought into where those polls were placed.

In 1977, the Black Valley was the last outpost and with good reason, and it was a difficult place to put Poles into the work that was buggy and that type of thing. Michael Daly was the engineer in charge of the working. This was an area of natural beauty and people were concerned about cause, you know, I think I told you one time about the person who said to me, I was down in the Black Valley Sunday and had a good look at it because I asked him he could see it without pause.

And I said to him, Jimerson, most of them, the poles are up. But we had run. There had been talk of that going in front of the well, there was there was a there was a snake that roared down in front of a nice lake. And anyway, we drove out to the polls behind the leg and then faded into the background fairly well in fairness to the speaker. And he didn't even see them that the.

In ESB, Black Valley was seen as maybe a formal and rural electrification, that final call in the Black Valley was the full stop on more than 30 years of work.

It ended as it started a simple pole planted in a remote location, according to ESB director Marguerite Sayers.

It was a feat of engineering, collective equality legacy. And if you stand and you look at any particular state of electricity poles, you know, and you look at a line and you look at it Head-On, you don't even see the forest from the rest of them will disappear behind it, because without the help of mechanization, they plant them absolutely straight. And I suppose you know that that left a pride in the work and the quality. And hopefully we're continuing that today.

The 75000 miles of electrical cable that crisscross the nation helped power a social and cultural revolution.

My mother had been a city woman really, and therefore getting used to bending down with the tongues and knowshon the green changing in the skin of her hands, the lifting of the pots and all of the rest of it. The electricity came too late to straighten the backs of too many women in Ireland. The economic benefits encourage migrants to come home later. The ECB played on the emotional impact of their return in a famous advert. And if there's a legacy to rural electrification, what occurred in Killgallon when that first pole was planted in 1946 is happening all over again, according to S.B deputy CEO Gerry O'Sullivan.

But you feel you're standing on the shoulders of your forefathers who put that ethos in place. And I suppose one example of that is our present project with Sirene, where we are bringing high speed broadband to rural Ireland using that same electricity network we've just spoken about. And there's no doubt about it that high speed broadband is like the light of the farmer years in the year 2016.

That future is something Phil Lynch couldn't have imagined. As a boy.

I very distinctly remember being primed. That's the right word to do the switch on. And my father was I was working and I wasn't aware that this had happened. I think it was later than usual, later than we expected, even when he came in and sort of got darker than we expected. And with us, I was trying to put the finger on the switch on the lights and lit up the whole place. As I said, the last line of the poem, things were never the same.

Changing light, it was nearly dark when he came in from the fields, tired from the tiles of the day, ready to complain about the Tili lamp still lit.

What do you have to light it himself? He asked if no one in particular, in the shadow of an empty space beneath the stairs, I stood primed. The man with the metal boots, their belts heavy as a gunslinger's, had spent what seemed like years digging holes to plant the crystal forest that stretched across the countryside with giant spools of wire unfurled along roads and lanes and fields.

I marveled at how they scaled the heights of those black poles and worked at right angles to the ground without falling stuntman. In the countdown to the skyways, it finger on the switch as if to take its pulse or like some general in the Kremlin with his thumb on the red button, waiting for the order to push the predetermined signal came from my mother at the table with all the strength in my body, just like flicked the magic switch outside the door turned instantly to dark inside.

The light would never be the same.