Community seeks heritage status for bomb factory

An East Cork community is to lobby the Government for special heritage status for sites of interest in the area, which hosts a bomb factory dating from the War of Independence.

The people of Knockraha fear a series of proposals by state electricity network provider Eirgrid will compromise the historically significant landscape which has been earmarked as a potential tourism attraction, and commissioned an archaeological firm to compile a report on the heritage in the area.

Knockraha hosts both a bomb factory dating from the War of Independence and a site known as Sing Sing — the official prison of the Cork No 1 Brigade of the IRA from 1916 to 1921 — and authors of the Rubicon report on the area believe the sites should be “preserved as part of the area’s wider War of Independence heritage”.

Local Fianna Fáil councillor Pádraig O’Sullivan said the power to designate War of Independence-era sites as protected heritage sites is at the discretion of the Minister for Environment, Heritage, and Local Government, Alan Kelly. He said Cork County Council did not take the bomb factory into account when considering a planning application by Eirgrid because the secretive structure is not visible above ground.

Eirgrid already has a station on a 21-acre site in the area, with an appeal for a nine-acre expansion currently with an Bord Pleanála. Its Gridlink pylon project, which would see a corridor of 400kV pylons built from Cork to Wexford and on to Kildare, is also set to have a terminal station in Knockraha. Eirgrid also recently wrote to residents in Knockraha to inform them feasibility studies for a proposed interconnector between Ireland and France will be carried out in the area.

The Rubicon report notes the Knockraha Area Historical & Heritage Society had explored the potential of conducting a geophysical survey at the site of the bomb factory, but the presence of a 220kV line immediately above it “is likely to interfere with the results of prospection”.

Identifying the site as an area of “key importance for IRA operations in Cork City and East Cork”, the Rubicon report states that Cork “has a unique opportunity in the coming years to lead the way in engagement and interpretation of the War of Independence landscape”.

“Knockraha serves as an ideal initial location for a countywide War of Independence trail, given the wealth of documentary sources and local knowledge regarding the progress of the conflict there,” the report reads. “A Knockraha trail could serve as a building block for a network of such trails throughout the county, developed in a cost-effective manner and based around local community engagement, education and participation.

“It could be argued that the rarity and importance of locations such as the Knockraha bomb factory are likely to far exceed that of many of the fully archaeologically protected sites located in the immediate hinterland; whereas there are tens of thousands of examples of ringforts, for example, there are exceptionally few locations associated with War of Independence bomb production.”