Some comments on JJ's approach to innovation in the Irish agricultural context can be made in the same critical spirit as were developed by the writer during the 1990s. The obstacles were in the social dimension.

The key innovation which JJ tried to promote, over most of his working life, was not an innovation in the global context, nor was it technically an innovation in the Irish context. It was to combine livestock, tillage and market gardening in a single synergistic locally-based productive system, run as a managed business(1). Something like this had been standard estate practice for centuries in England, and was reflected in the management practices of some of the Irish estates. It required a fairly large-scale operational unit, if the synergy was to be demonstrated effectively.

In such a system it would be feasible to stall-feed the livestock in the winter, keeping up a steady flow of milk and meat production throughout the year, thus enabling industry to develop, supplying added-value products, effectively on the Danish model. This model however became more and more remote and unrealisable as the 'land for the people' slogan was interpreted in terms of division of estates into small individual subsistence farms(2). In the latter situation the 'easy way' was to allow the production to follow the growth of the grass, generating seasonal gluts of meat and milk, and making the marketing into a commodity disposal operation, rather than a profitable added-value employment-generating operation.

JJ attempted to modify aspects of his visionary system to adapt to the political fait-accompli of the existential smallholding community. In 1916 he was promoting local co-operative ownership of advanced American agricultural machinery(3). In the 1923 Report he supported the resurrection of the policies of the Horace Plunkett Department of Agriculture(4); also he put in a plea for the training of co-op managers(5). In his addendum to the 1926 Prices Commission Report he promoted co-operative marketing on the French model, coupled with value-added components in the distribution system(6).

In 1931 he was promoting winter milk production(7), but then under the influence of the economic war he went into polemical mode, aiming for the political arena, into which he arrived via the Seanad in 1938. Here he had a platform to promote aspects of his vision, taking up the support of the Mount St Club model(8), as a means of re-deploying some of the Dublin unemployed into productive agriculture, on the basis of his ideal synergistic large-farm system.

In the 1940s JJ's main attention was on the Post-Emergency Agricultural Commission and he succeeded in highlighting some key innovative issues having a socio-technical dimension. The third section on Production of Store and Fat Cattle is quite short, and states the problem of British policy on fat-cattle subsidy, with its 3-month residence requirement, generating an artificially high demand for 'forward stores', but takes it as a necessary constraint. JJ's arguments about the need to negotiate this politically, to get parity with Northern Ireland, and build up stall-feeding with consequential tillage-enhancement, was not at this stage taken on board. It was simply recommended that stores be de-horned for ease of transport. The idea of developing a trade in veal, on the continental pattern, was entertained.

In other words, JJ got them to recognise a key 'negative (economic) innovation' brought in by the British, but failed to get the socio-technical implications for the Irish economy put on the political agenda.

The fourth and final section on Feeding of Cattle homes in sharply on the key issue: winter feed supplies. No breeding programme will be any use unless the animals are fed adequately; an estimated extra 150 gallons of milk annually per cow was feasible with proper feeding alone. A radical change in grassland management was called for, with production of silage, supplemented by hay, roots, straw and green forage crops. This section contained what JJ had been campaigning for during the previous decade(9).

In his last attempt to bring together some shreds of his 'managed synergy' vision of Irish agriculture, JJ attempted to demonstrate (on his Grattan Lodge smallholding, near Vicarstown, Co Laois) that a market gardening enterprise could benefit by being associated with a few cows, adding value to their manure(10).

This completes the listing of episodes where JJ encountered obstacles to his technically innovative ideas, which were rooted in negative social forces. It is possible to conclude, in retrospect, that the key missing factor, preventing his vision from being realised, had been identified and called for by him in 1923: the provision of training for co-operative managers in the principles underlying the 'co-operative transformation of the estates' vision. Such people, had they existed, would have provided local leadership alternative to the village gombeens and the parish priests, and enabled 'project teams of motivated end-users' (to trespass into 90s socio-technical jargon) to have been built out of the working farmers and farm labourer populations of the rural communities. Isolated progressive priests like Fr McDyer of Glencolumcille were too little, too late.

Had this politics developed in the 1920s, as an alternative to the Fianna Fail land division and protected gombeen-capitalism policy which emerged in the 1930s, Irish rural and urban civilisation would have been able to follow a path closer to the Danish, with a strong labour movement.

During the 1940s in TCD I was very much aware of the obstacles in the way of doing good science in Ireland, and of the high emigration rate of science graduates. I was in process of absorbing the ideas of JD Bernal on the social function of science, and on how science interacted with the State, and with economic and technological progress. I read a paper to the Dublin University Experimental Science Association on these topics, perhaps around 1949(11).

During the 1950s in the Paris Ecole Polytechnique I became very aware of the importance of teamwork among people of complementary skills. I recognised the nature of the Bernal vision of the productive unit of the future Socialist society, organised as team of enthusiasts who understood the needs of their 'market', while not simply being motivated by greed(12). Subsequently in the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies I was very much aware of the cultural gap between what we were doing in experimental science, and the needs of Irish industry, but was unable to address the issue in any organised way. There were, I think, articles in left-wing periodicals, like the Plough and the Irish Democrat. [If I find these I will reference them.]

I found time in the 1960s to address, at an abstracted level, various socio-technical issues; there was an organisation set up in 1965 called the Council for Science and Technology in Ireland, the objective of which was to lobby the Government in the context of the Lynch-Miller OECD Report Science and Irish Economic Development(13). This work was however at the level of 'science and society' politics; I was not concerned with the problem of how to adapt the productive team to the innovation in any specific context. I was of course concerned in Aer Lingus with techno-economic analysis of some specific innovations, and in investment decision support(14).

I repeatedly referenced the social dimension of the innovation process in the Irish Times series in the 1970s. There was also a social dimension implicit in some of the applied-research consultancy work implemented in the 1970s at the TCD-industry interface. The former projected critical views of various human structures and institutions relevant to the science scene, of the innovation process as it existed in Ireland, and on the problem of access to scientific and technical information. The latter covered areas like use of genetic resources by plant-breeders, and organisation of information relating to marine resources(15).

As an example of my contribution to the socio-technical debates which centred round the projected Dublin oil refinery in the mid-1970s, I reproduced the following:

January 30 1974

I have hesitated coming into the controversial area of the proposed Dublin oil refinery before this; basically I am 'environmentalist', while at the same time being in favour of upgrading the technological diversity of the Irish industrial base. These two objectives are not incompatible, provided the environmental legislation is adequate....

I have now had a chance to see the IIRS report on the pollution levels which are considered in the planning application for a refinery on reclaimed land in the Pigeon House area, and on the effluent control practice which is envisaged.

The IIRS report states that '..the measures proposed by the applicants in regard to air and water pollution control represent the very best practice at this time....present pollution levels are not expected to show noticeable increase due to the proposed refinery; indeed SO2 levels may fall'.

The total daily emission of SO2 from the 100m stack is not to exceed 20 tonnes per day, compared to an overall Dublin emission variously estimated at 250 to 500 tonnes.

The mechanism for the conjectured fall in overall SO2 levels implied in the IIRS statement is that the total SO2 in the city includes that generated by refined oils consumed. The proposed refinery apparently plans to work on 'light Arabian and West African crude with sulphur content below 2%'. This must be compared with the oil which the ESB is currently burning at Ringsend. I am not currently in a position to make this comparison, but I can see that by operating an appropriate buying policy, by controlling the sulphur extraction during refinement subject to stringent effluent regulations, and by doing a deal with the ESB to take up the residual oil to fire its Ringsend generator, the net situation could be improved, and this is what is in the plan.

Most of the opposition to the Dublin refinery appears to be based on a figure of 100 tonnes per day of SO2 suggested by Dr Donal Flood, who in his retirement from the IIRS is acting as scientific adviser to the environmentalists. I do not doubt that this figure is a correct measure of refinery practice under conditions where effluent control is weak or non-existent. What Dr Flood is suggesting is that the proposed levels of control would be flouted consistently, due to inadequacy of effluent control legislation. So may I suggest that the debate be brought around to the issue of urban effluent control, and that the refinery debate be examined again by the environmentalists with a critical eye?

Firstly......do we need a refinery for the Irish home market? To answer this we need to go into the history of refining proposals in Ireland. The story goes back to 1939 when in the Fianna Fail 'self-sufficiency' epoch an effort was made by Sean Lemass to establish refinery capacity in Dublin, with the aid of London and Thames Oil Wharves ltd. This company (I don't know if it still exists) was an independent operator, outside the major multinational ring, which was prepared to do business with dangerous revolutionary countries like Mexico (which had just nationalised its oil) and Ireland (which had until recently been engaged in an 'economic war' with Britain, arising from the attempt by the de Valera Government to achieve some of the objectives of the 1921 Republicans which had not been conceded in the Treaty setting up the Irish Free State).

A refinery proposal was produced and discussed in the Press, but ultimately was blocked, apparently as a result of pressure by the major oil companies.

Then in the fifties, under political pressure, the Government was instrumental in setting up the Whitegate refinery near Cork, under the joint ownership of three of the major oil companies. The effect of this joint ownership was to block all internally-generated development proposals, as any such had to be approved not just by one but by three boards abroad. Chemical engineering staff was allowed to run down, those remaining becoming disgruntled; it is now, I understand, a routine operation run by technicians. Whitegate supplies 50% of the market of the Republic.

Why was a refinery not built at Dublin at that time? Contemporaneously one was built a Belfast: a natural place, near its main market, minimising short-haul transport-costs. On this argument the only possible site for a refinery is Dublin.. The Belfast refinery raised no environmental storm; nor, for that matter, did Whitegate.

To answer that question, consider the recent fuel crisis..... Anyone who travelled to Britain by car-ferry over Christmas, as I did, will have noted that in Britain there is no visible shortage of petrol. I covered 600 miles and never saw a queue or a closed garage. Clearly the Irish market, as far as the oil majors is concerned, is an appendage of the British distribution system, and they want to keep it that way. It is, apparently, policy to concentrate refining capacity in Britain and to block the development of independent refining capacity in Ireland. Dublin is supplied from Pembroke.

The current Dublin refinery proposal has major implications for the oil multinationals. As far as I can gather, it is a joint venture between Irish and French interests, the latter being the French State oil company.

A refinery in Dublin, on the currently economic scale of operations, would be too big to be content with the 50% of the home market left by Whitegate. It would have to seek markets in Britain, supplying them with refined fuel by small coastal tanker. This is the reason for the French interest.....

A refinery in Dublin, independent of the major multinationals, would enable the Government to do an independent deal directly with an oil-producing country.

Consider now the problem of siting the refinery anywhere else. During the building phase you would have to import labour on a temporary basis, up to 2500, which would then run down on completion leaving a staff of possibly 300 for operations, maintenance and development. To build in an isolated place away from major centres, as well as being inherently a costly operation, is to condemn the completed unit to the status of a routine operation with minimal further technological development potential. For this to occur, an imaginative technological staff of high calibre has to be close to and interacting with other technological and scientific services, such as are only to be found near a major urban centre.

...The only possible site for a refinery is a major port, and in the interests of minimising short-haul costs it should be near its main market.

The task of the environmental lobby is, therefore, to press that the effluent, noise-levels and appearance are consistent with nationally-imposed standards. From what I have seen of the IIRS report, this should not be unduly difficult. Blanket opposition to a refinery on a declared and accepted industrial area at a major port is, I feel, overdoing the environmental watchdog role. So can the debate be re-started, with less heat and more light....?

On the question of oil spillage: to site the refinery in Dublin would involve a change in the method of handling of the oil volume consumed on the home market from a short-haul, small-vessel system to a long-haul, large vessel system. This would substantially reduce the number of fuel transfer operations, reducing spillage probability. Adding in some short-haul operations to supply the surplus to the British market would bring the total number of handlings to something like the present level. This would of course need to be evaluated and watched... We are already facing this risk at Whiddy Island, without any significant economic benefit or compensation. We have the means at Whiddy of measuring the spillage risk, so that the Dublin debate can be quantified in this regard.....

February 20 1974

Pollution by oil refineries was the subject of a lecture last week to the Institution of Chemical Engineers (Irish Section) by Mr P A Winchester, who is manager of the Whitegate Refinery.

Among the points he emphasised was the fact that there was no effective State-controlled pollution monitoring unit, with which a potential polluter could deal. This function, insofar is it exists, now lies with the IIRS, which will do an ad-hoc job when asked. This is not a substitute for a continuous independent monitoring body.

Mr Winchester pointed out that it is relatively inexpensive to build in pollution control at the design stage (eg segregated effluents which can be processed in the ways appropriate to the known contaminants, instead of a mess in a common sewer).

He then went into the economics and technology of water-treatment of crude oil: the sulphur tends to occur in the form of mercaptans, giving an offensive smell. These hydrolyse to H2S, which is then reacted with oxygen giving water and free sulphur. There is a market for this with the acid manufacturers. The process is tricky to control and consumes energy, but it can be done, and some of the cost is recovered with the sale of the sulphur.

Kuwait crude, which contains 4.3% sulphur, can be reduced to the 1% level, but to do so requires expenditure of 11% of the energy contained in the oil. For half the energy expenditure you can get the sulphur down to 2%. If you try to wash out the SO2 from the exhaust gases, you cool them, so that the plume does not rise well from the stack. The overall solution must be a compromise between good stack design and partial extraction of sulphur from the crude.

Noise, due mainly to furnaces and air cooling systems, can be designed out by totally enclosing the noise source and adding appropriate brick walls. (Again, there are no national noise standards, and no independent national or local noise monitoring service).

Mr Winchester called for a new breed, the 'environmental engineer', trained in a broad-based discipline familiar with all aspects of water and air pollution, whether by chemical, biological or physical (eg noise) processes.... The major industrial firms would have to employ such people, if they had to cope with a State monitoring service with teeth.

Plant managers, such as Mr Winchester, clearly want to employ such people.

Their Boards, however, are unlikely to sanction the spending of money in this direction unless their competitors are in the same position. So it is clearly up to the Government to legislate to introduce a statutory authority, and to the Universities to develop some sort of a masters-degree programme for converting our surplus of physicists, chemists and biologists into environmental engineers.

Most of the opposition to the Dublin Bay refinery proposal (which I am informed is based on a long-term contract option on Algerian oil at 2% sulphur) is based on the lack of such an authority, and on the presumed inability of Dubliners to press the Government politically to legislate for one.

According to the IIRS evaluation of the Dublin Bay project, all the design points mentioned by Mr Winchester are provided for at the start. With 600,000 Dubliners watching, I suggest that we are more likely to get legislation for a pollution monitor service than if the problem is banished to a green-field site, under the control of one of the 'big seven' oil-multinationals.

Mr Winchester analysed the history of the spillage of oil at Whitegate. Some 1500-1700 ships per annum are handled. In the four years 1970-1973 spills occurred on 7,5,4 and 1 occasions. This improving record is a result of a conscious effort to improve the management procedure governing the interaction between two crews, usually having a language barrier between them.

A State monitoring service could facilitate this learning process by being visibly present, and possibly even supplying interpreters, if necessary.

In the 1980s as Techne Associates consultancy the present writer produced several reports with a socio-technical dimension, initially in the context of the Institute of Physics Technology Group, and then later for Shannon Development and various State agencies, addressing issues like how to interface innovative enterprise development with technical colleges, and how to develop inter-regional linkages between innovative firms and sources of knowhow(16).

But it was not until the 1990s that I had a chance to participate in an EU project in which a knowledge-base about the uptake of innovative IT was developed as a marketable product. This was not a success, but it is useful to analyse the socio-technical reasons why, using the knowledge embedded in the unsuccessful system. It led on to work in 'case-based reasoning' applications which enabled a systematic approach to be developed for indexing hypertext knowledge-bases(17).

The 'innovation uptake' paradigm also turns out to be helpful in understanding why JJ's technically innovative approach to agriculture failed to influence the politics.

I had been very much aware of the techno-economics of renewable energy sources, and had lobbied about the need for renewable energy in the 1970s and 1980s. The socio-economic aspect of the question has been incisively developed by Richard Douthwaite(18) though with a somewhat bleak future outlook.

Notes and References

2. JJ made his position on this issue quite clear in his contribution to the January 1939 debate in the Seanad on the Land Bill (1938). Farm labourers paid according to their worth on a well-managed estate would earn more than a subsistence 30-acre farmer.

3. JJ first recorded his support for co-operative mechanisation as early as his 1916 Albert Kahn Report on food production in France during the war.

4. The 1923 Agricultural Commission Report was unfairly dismissed by the populist 'land for the people' lobby as a 'ranchers' charter', with the result that its progressive aspects did not have the impact they deserved.

5. JJ's contribution to the work of the Commission included a call for the education of co-op managers, who would have been crucial to the achievement of JJ's vision.

6. JJ's objective in his work on the 1926 Prices Commission was to draw attention to the role of friction in the distribution system, which gave rise to a big gap between farmers' and consumers' prices. He had studied this in the course of his Rockefeller Fellowship, from which he abstracted the French experience for his addendum to the Prices Report. He also called for a National Economic Council with a co-ordinating role.

7. In his Plea for Winter Dairying (JSSISI XV, 33, 1930-31) which was read on March 19 1931, JJ tried to develop arguments in favour of de-seasonalising milk production around the need for effective marketing of butter.

8. This proposal in the Seanad, which was debated on December 13 1939, was greeted with active hostility; it was suggested that the people concerned were ex-servicemen from the British Army who were being used to being told what to do.

9. This Post-Emergency Agriculture Report is accessed primarily from the Seanad and public service thread of the hypertext; it makes sense however to access it here in the socio-technical context.

10. In 1959 JJ regaled the SSISI, anecdotally, with this experience, in the context of a symposium on the Whitaker economic plan.

11. I expand on this in the 1940s science and society module, this theme being over-viewed in Appendix 11.

12. I have expanded on the work of the Ecole Polytechnique team in the 1950s academic module, where I have located it, since its output was scientific papers, though the scale of the operation was industrial.

13. I outlined the work of the CSTI in the context of a series of articles I did for the Irish Times, which contributed to the OECD Report discussions, and the formation of public opinion in favour the the Government organising to fund science, setting up the National Science Council.

14. This work is best followed in the techno-economic thread, over-viewed in Appendix 13.

15. The 1970s socio-technical module gives an overview entry-point to the Irish Times series; the key socio-technical chapters are 1.2 Structures and Institutions, 3.3 Innovations and 5.2 Scientific and Technical Information. It goes on to outline the TCD genetic and marine work.

16. I have over-viewed these projects in the 1980s socio-technical module. In chronological order they were titled: 1981-1983: The IPIB Technology Group (this was marginal-time voluntary work); April and November 1985: Local Enterprise and the RTCs (Youth Employment Agency); October 1986: RTD Linkages between LFRs (National Board for Science and Technology); March 1988: The Mentec Customer Analysis System. They gave rise to various 'grey area' reports, some of which may be accessibly archived.

17. The experience gained here is at the root of the technology of the present hypertext publication. I outline it in a case-based reasoning essay associated with this theme. Related publications include Bergmann et al, Developing Industrial Case-based Reasoning Applications (Springer 1999). See also the IT-USE project funded by the EU Commission.

18. I have reproduced, with permission, in the supportive hypertext Richard Douthwaite's essay When Should We Have Stopped? published in the weekend supplement of the Irish Times of December 29 2001, and added some comments suggesting feasible policy changes. This builds on earlier work I had done, as noted in the 1970s techno-economic module, which continued in the 1980s with the Nairobi UN renewable energy conference, the momentum of which declined but revived again in the 1990s.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 2003