Transatlantic exchange, urban development and heterogeneous engineering in the west of Ireland: Belmullet's unbuilt railways, c. 1820-1920 (Pre Published)

Abstract

This chapter focuses on technological and geo-spatial dreams of modernity through a study of the unexecuted proposals for developing the town of Belmullet in Co. Mayo as a transatlantic packet station. It adds to the growing literature on north Atlantic exchange and the development of early steamship and railway routes in Ireland. Theoretically, it engages with the concept of Ireland as a functional networked unit within a transnational geo-political infrastructure of certain fixities and flows, and of railways as a core new technology in the development of the nineteenth-century state. The scheme’s proponents believed that Belmullet, in one of the poorest and least developed outer edges of pre-Famine Ireland, could become an infrastructural node of national and international importance. This chapter focuses on the advocacy of landlords, ‘boosters’, and especially engineers for Belmullet’s development.