‘IT is difficult to comprehend today that the biggest employer outside of agriculture in West Cork for much of the 19th century were the Allihies mines of ‘Copper John’ Puxley,’ says author Eamon McCarthy.
McCarthy, from Kilbrittain, has an engineering degree and worked in the mining industry for 37 years.
Having now retired in California, he has written a book about Ireland’s great contribution to the global industry.
‘The Allihies mines were not even close to being the first metal mines in the region,’ he points out. ‘Professor William O’Brien of UCC has documented copper mining on Mount Gabriel 3,700 years ago.
When the Allihies deposits became uneconomic, the miners, and many hundreds more Cork emigrants flocked to the developing mining districts in Leadville, Colorado and Butte, Montana. Some prospered but many more died young in mining accidents or from respiratory issues like tuberculosis and silicosis.’
An early success was James O’Brien, who ran the second biggest hydraulic gold mine in California.
He could not read or write but could converse in Chinese and used electric light in 1880 so his mines could run at night in the short, wet season.
‘O’Brien lived out his life in Smartsville as a very successful fruit farmer,’ says McCarthy. ‘Pat Sullivan from Bantry was not so lucky. He died in a cave-in in Idaho in 1893, but the prospect he discovered the previous summer in British Columbia was developed into Canada’s biggest and most productive metal mine in the 20th century. Sullivan Mountain produced $20bn in zinc, lead, tin, indium and silver, before it shut down in 2001.’
Mary Harris from Inchigeelagh lost a husband and four children to yellow fever in the 1860s, but as Mother Jones, she became a passionate mining union organiser and crusader against child labour.
‘She was known for her turns of phrase like “I am not a humanitarian, I am a hell-raiser”, he says of the campaigner, who is honoured with a festival in her name every year in Cork city.
Another McCarthy – Mike from Skibbereen – went to Canada in 1950 as a bricklayer and got into uranium exploration as a sideline.
‘He and partner Pat Hughes returned to Ireland in the late 1950s,’ Eamon explains. ‘With Mike’s new Priority Drilling, they explored old copper workings in Allihies and Bunmahon in Waterford, proving there was little of economic value left. But they found new lead and zinc deposits in Tynagh in Galway and near Navan that were developed into successful new mines and created the modern Irish metal industry.’
Their stories and many others are chronicled in ‘The Irish Miners’, available now on Amazon.
