Water, Noise, and Energy: The Story of Irish Hydropower in Three Plays

Abstract

Hydroelectric power projects were an integral part of twentieth-century postcolonial modernisation in Ireland. In 1925, the Cumann na nGaedheal government began the Shannon Scheme, which created the then-largest dam in Europe at Ardnacrusha. Hydroelectric power stations have since emerged across Ireland, from Poulaphouca and Ballyshannon to Inniscarra and Carrigadrohid. Despite the importance of hydropower in shaping Irish environments, ecocritical scholars like Matthew Henry and Sharae Deckard have shown that depictions of hydropower are generally understudied in the environmental and energy humanities and in Irish studies. This article traces twentieth-century hydroelectric power projects in Ireland through three plays: Denis Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River (1931), Frank Harvey’s Farewell to Every White Cascade (1958), and Conor McPherson’s The Weir (1997). Depictions of hydropower in these stage and radio dramas reveal an ongoing cultural awareness of one of modernity’s more insidious pollutants, namely, noise pollution. Exploring sound elements in representations of hydropower across diverse media and genres requires grappling with the legacy of colonialism on material environments in technocratic solutions to postcolonial national development and to planetary crises like climate change. Using postcolonial ecocritical and ecomedia studies lenses, this article analyses aural environments in Johnston, Harvey, and McPherson’s plays to elucidate intersections of medium, energy extraction, and hydropower that continue to resonate across Ireland. Besides providing historical insight into changing relationships with material environments, these plays also expose environmental and multispecies injustices caused by energy extraction projects on Ireland’s rivers. The aural environments in these plays also raise questions about what kind of modernisation and infrastructure projects would support multispecies modernities for more just and decolonial futures. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how these twentieth-century literary representations of hydroelectric energy extraction imagine alternative possibilities to anthropocentric modernisation through attending to multisensory and multispecies attachments to place.

1. Introduction: The Changing Aural Environments of Ireland’s Not So Quiet Revolution

In 1947, a radio version of Denis Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River aired on the BBC. Unlike the opening scene of the stage drama, the radio play does not begin in the quiet of a house but with Dobelle, the local Irish engineer, meta-critically and retrospectively commenting on the story, pointing out that he is “one of the central characters in this—comedy” (Johnston 1947, p. 1). Dobelle’s pause on how to characterise the drama, presumably as comedy or tragedy, indicates ambivalence about the destruction of the power station at the end of the play. He goes on to explain how forms of (eco)tourism, like hiking, have changed the region since the story was “first told,” when his house “was still a hermitage, and it seemed incongruous that a German should have built a Power House on the river below. I could hear it humming whenever I opened my window. Like this” (ibid.). The turbine noise in Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River occludes the sounds of the river. River sounds would be silenced in the blasts of dam construction in Frank Harvey’s 1958 radio drama Farewell to Every White Cascade, leaving a haunting silence audible in Conor McPherson’s 1997 stage play, The Weir. These depictions of hydroelectric development indicate that the electrification of rural Ireland was not simply a “quiet revolution,” as Michael J. Shiel’s important book on the Rural Electrification Scheme indicates (Shiel 1984). Rather, electrification entailed noisy construction projects, which Michael Rubenstein describes: “The sound of Ardnacrusha’s construction would have been enough to wake up the soundest sleeper; for most of 1926 and 1927, daily dynamite blasts punctuated the carving out of the head- and tailrace” (Rubenstein 2010, p. 130). Similarly, the operation of the power stations established persistent sounds. In the preface to his well-known history of the Shannon Scheme, Michael McCarthy acknowledges “having lived within earshot of the massive turbines at Ardnacrusha while growing up” (McCarthy 2004, p. 9). The noise of construction and the subsequent operation of the power station altered the sounds above and below the waterline. In addition to the noise of construction and operation, terraforming material environments for energy extraction drained wetlands, as canal building destroyed multispecies habitats (McSweeney 2024).

Despite the devastating consequences dams have on the lifeways of migratory fish and on biodiverse habitats, hydroelectric power is regularly framed as a low-carbon and even sustainable option in the face of the climate crisis (Johnson 2024; Ding 2024; McSweeney 2024). Even after the blasts of construction, underwater noise pollution continues to impact more-than-human worlds, though some dam removal projects have successfully supported ecosystem recovery (Duarte et al. 2019, p. 63; see also McSweeney 2024; Houart et al. 2025; McCully 2001; Farina and Reid 2020; Guarino 2013; Mauer 2020; Hudson 2021). Yet hydroelectric dams historically have been an important form of development for postcolonial nations in the twentieth century (Chakrabarty 2021, pp. 61–62). To use M. P. Johnson’s words on hydropower development in Brazil, “[b]ig dams are a potent symbol of government capability,” and the engineering involved has been seen as a way of countering colonial and racist stereotypes in addition to producing electricity (Johnson 2024, pp. 36–37, 34). The twentieth century consequently became an era of modernisation for postcolonial regions across the Global North and South, thereby significantly altering landscapes and soundscapes.

After Ireland’s partial independence in 1922, the Free State used the construction of hydroelectric dams to assert sovereignty and domestically industrialise the colonially underdeveloped nation (O’Hearn 2001, p. 112). The Free State took a significant financial risk by spending a substantial amount of its overall budget between 1925 and 1929 on the Shannon Scheme, which built the then largest dam and one of the first national electrical grids in Europe (Rubenstein 2010, p. 148; O’Connor 2013, p. 160; O’Brien 2017, p. vii; Manning and McDowell 1984, p. 39). The expansion of hydroelectricity in the Free State coincided with intensifying peat extraction during the Anglo-Irish Trade War and later as imported coal from England became scarce in the Second World War (Potts 2018, p. xxiii, 76; Deckard 2022, p. 379). After the Shannon Scheme, the Free State built a power station on the River Liffey. As the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) began its Rural Electrification Scheme in 1946, the Free State (soon to be the Republic of Ireland) worked with Northern Irish governmental departments on creating two hydroelectric power stations on the River Erne (Kennedy 2013, p. xii). By the late 1950s, the Rivers Erne and Lee would be dammed to extract energy from the rivers’ flow. These energy projects facilitated development projects after 1958, when the Republic of Ireland turned to foreign direct investment to develop national resources. Expanding chemical, pharmaceutical, electronics, and refining industries integrated Ireland’s economy and biospheres into globalised systems led by US-based multinationals (Allen 2004, pp. 10–11; O’Hearn 2001, p. 175). These developments in Ireland occurred during the period known as the Great Acceleration, as many other postcolonial regions in the Global South gained national independence and undertook similar kinds of modernisation projects based on colonial and Western forms of development (Chakrabarty 2021, pp. 61–62).

Johnston, Harvey, and McPherson’s plays collectively indicate how Western forms of development and even supposedly renewable and “green” kinds of energy audibly altered material landscapes and multispecies environments in postcolonial Ireland. Energy extraction generally remains an underexplored area in Irish studies, as Sharae Deckard has shown: “Irish literature has rarely been examined in relation to questions of hydrocarbons and other forms of energy” (Deckard 2022, p. 377). Moreover, hydropower is often overlooked in the environmental and energy humanities, which have largely focused on fossil fuels (Henry 2022, p. 17). Although scholars like Sorcha O’Brien (2017) and Éimear O’Connor (2013) have examined how photographs and paintings like those of Seán Keating visually track the dramatic changes to the landscape that the Shannon Scheme brought to rural Ireland, scholars have yet to examine cultural representations of human and more-than-human sounds that inform understandings of place, multispecies relationships, and attachments to material environments.

Through postcolonial ecocriticism and ecomedia studies lenses, this article analyses what I am calling aural environments, which are cultural representations of human and more-than-human sounds that inform understandings of place, multispecies relationships, and attachments to material environments. The idea of aural environments builds on the work of sound studies scholars, but it focuses on how representations of cultural and natural sounds illuminate shifting relationships to place (R. Murray Schafer [1977] 1994; Ari Y. Kelman 2010; Trish Morgan 2019; Alain Corbin 1998; Mark Peter Wright 2022; Jonathan Sterne 2003; Douglas Kahn 2013). By analysing the aural environments of Irish hydropower projects in Johnston, Harvey, and McPherson’s plays, this article demonstrates new ways of approaching Irish cultural relationships with land and environment. It presents modes of reading that help to, in Emily Bloom’s words on Irish radio modernism, “re-read the literary past [through] the sonic resonances in modernist texts” (Bloom 2016, p. 170). Sonic resonances in dramatic works emerge in Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats, and Edward Martyn’s intention “to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory” (Gregory 1991, p. 378). Their focus on listening and speaking recognises the potential of plays and dramatic production on stage and later radio to tap into the ubiquity of Irish oral traditions. Many of these oral traditions were recorded and broadcast across shifting media landscapes in the mid-century as energy extraction, the electrical grid, and broadcast media unfolded across rural Ireland. Rather than advocating a return to a romanticised past, the aural environments in Johnston, Harvey, and McPherson’s plays reveal human and more-than-human entanglements that expose the limitations of Western colonial and anthropocentric forms of national development when such developments do not work towards multispecies futures on a shared planet.

The aural environments in Johnston, Harvey, and McPherson’s plays elucidate intersections of medium, energy extraction, and hydropower in an advancing modernity that continues to resonate across Ireland, from the whirring engines of planes, cars, boats, and trains to the persistent hum of data centres. Through first exploring how noise directs actions, events, and understandings of life and family in The Moon in the Yellow River, my subsequent analysis of material agencies in Harvey’s radio drama demonstrates the interlocked relationships among expanding broadcast networks, energy extraction, rural electrification, and shifting auralities in rural Ireland. By the late twentieth century, when McPherson’s The Weir was first produced, an eerie silence resounds in the play’s use of photographs in the set design and the ghost stories in the narrative to expose and implicitly critique the environmental impacts of hydropower stations. Exploring these representations of sound and hydropower across diverse media requires grappling with the legacy of colonialism on material environments in technocratic solutions to postcolonial national development and to planetary crises like climate change. Throughout my analyses, I rely on Matthew Henry’s assertion that “narrative interventions are necessary for a just transition” (Henry 2022, p. 6). The transitioning forms of energy production and consumption in Johnston, Harvey, and McPherson’s stage and radio dramas not only provide historical insight into environmental and multispecies injustices caused by energy extraction projects on Ireland’s rivers. They also raise questions about what kind of modernisation and infrastructure projects would support multispecies modernities for more just and decolonial futures. Ultimately, this article shows how these literary representations of hydro-electric energy extraction imagine alternative possibilities to anthropocentric modernisation through attending to multisensory and multispecies experiences of place.

2. “Listen to the Noise of Your Turbines”: The Auralities of Labour and Freedom in Denis Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River

The Moon in the Yellow River first appeared on the Abbey Theatre stage in 1931, just two years after the power station at Ardnacrusha became fully operational. Johnston does not specify where the power station in the play is, but he writes that “its setting suggests the Liffey or the Shannon,” though Broadway versions of the play suggest a setting closer to Dublin (Johnston 1979, pp. 81, 83). The set at the Abbey Theatre in 1931, O’Brien points out, was but “a thinly disguised Shannon Scheme” (O’Brien 2017, p. 231n10). The Shannon Scheme was carried out in the years leading up to Johnston’s creation of The Moon in the Yellow River. The character of the German engineer, Tausch, indicates the Free State’s collaboration with Siemens Schuckert to build the power station. This three-act play takes place on the same evening in the home of Irish engineer Dobelle, whom Tausch visits. Upon arriving, Tausch meets the housekeeper Agnes, Dobelle’s daughter Blánaid, Blánaid’s aunt Columba, and two sailors named George and Captain Potts. As the evening unfolds, two anti-Treaty soldiers, Willie Reilly and Darrell Blake, come and relate their plans to blow up the power station. To prevent this from happening, Tausch taps into new telecommunications networks to phone the Free State police, oblivious to the ongoing violence between the Treatyite Free State and the anti-Treaty resistance (Regan 1999, p. 125). The Free State Commandant Lanigan arrives and murders Blake, much to Tausch’s shock and horror.

Expressionist elements in the play’s depiction of violence after the Irish Civil War and the Free State’s extra-judicial killings led to mixed reviews and ongoing critique of the play in Ireland. Although The Moon in the Yellow River was lauded outside of Ireland and performed multiple times in Britain, Canada, and the United States, it received “hisses” on opening night at the Abbey and continued to garner critique when it was performed over half a century later (Adams 2002, p. 113). At the revival of the play at the Abbey Theatre in August 1983, Michael D. Higgins critically described Johnston’s play in the Sunday Tribune: “[I]t’s a middle class parody of the IRA. It seems to be as out of touch, now as then” (Higgins 1983). Higgins’s comment comes at the height of the Troubles when the depictions of the pro- and anti-Treaty factions in the play reflect persistent violence without addressing the complex constellations of power that incite or sustain that violence. Like Higgins, Rubenstein critiques Johnston’s play, asserting that Johnston’s social position as an upper-middle class Protestant steered him to perpetuate derogatory colonial stereotypes of Irishness and stage Irish characters: “Modernization will fail in Ireland, so the ending predicts, because, tautologically, everything is bound to fail in Ireland—because the Irish are comic failures” (Rubenstein 2010, p. 161). Although Johnston’s family supported Home Rule and Johnston tried to join Sinn Féin in 1918, he did not evince anti-imperialist nor anti-Treaty politics, though he was interested in “social revolution” in the late 1920s (Adams 2002, pp. 38–39, 108).

Johnston’s background undoubtedly fed into his representations of the pro- and anti-Treaty conflict in the play, but elements of expressionism indicate an intervention into larger debates about modernisation. The Moon in the Yellow River builds on Johnston’s interest in German expressionism, from his direction of Georg Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight in 1927 in the Gate Theatre to his later collaborations with Ernst Toller (Sisson 2011, p. 46; Fischer 2015, p. 31). In discussing expressionism in Irish theatre in the 1920s, Elaine Sisson writes: “The stage becomes a defined space which emerges in the aftermath of a fractured post-revolutionary Ireland, and experimental drama and theatre design allows us to see, as well as to hear, what dissent looks like. Glimpses of Irish culture, viewed through the refracted prism of experimental modernism, puncture received histories of Irish social and cultural life” (Sisson 2011, p. 55). While the play’s expressionism can appear a callous representation of the violence and uncertainty after the Civil War, it also gave rise to Tausch, who, in Joachim Fischer’s words, is “arguably the best-known ‘stage German’ in twentieth-century Irish theatrical history” (Fischer 2015, p. 31). Tausch represents Western rationality and technocratic nationalism in his conviction that the power station brings progress and liberation to the region. For Tausch, technology must progress, regardless of the cost to human and more-than-human life, a point he makes explicitly at the end of the play when he describes his work at the power station: “What I am doing here is greater than any of the considerations you fling at me—yes, greater even than the life of a man” (Johnston 1979, p. 154). This disregard for life in the name of technological progress persists after the explosion when Tausch’s concern for the power station staff comes as an afterthought, leading him to abruptly exit the play (Johnston 1979, p. 156). Tausch’s obtuse faith in new technologies exposes an idealism that many after the Second World War began to associate with 1930s fascism in Europe, not only in Germany but also in Ireland through the politics of Eoin O’Duffy and the Blueshirts (Fischer 2015, p. 50; Wills 2007, p. 348; Regan 1999, pp. 324–29). Yet Fischer explains how Johnston “wanted him [Tausch] not to be portrayed as a future Nazi, but the audience was supposed to understand his confusion deriving from his idealism and goodwill” (Fischer 2015, p. 50). Such “idealism and goodwill” emerged through ideologies of improvement that have regularly been used in colonial Ireland to justify changes to human and more-than-human relationships and environments (Taylor 2024, p. 75). The ideological and colonial underpinnings of progress and improvement historically indicate a broad range of possible and debatable definitions for modernity and modernisation in postcolonial Ireland in the 1930s.

The play’s sound directions and dialogues demonstrate tensions between Tausch’s idealistic techno-rationalism and the perspectives other characters bring to the play’s narrative. These competing perspectives emerge in the play’s title, The Moon in the Yellow River, which comes from Ezra Pound’s “Epitaphs” in his 1916 Lustra. The title indicates Johnston’s use of what Joseph Lennon theorises as Irish orientalism, in which writers in the postcolonial state reclaimed a colonially peripheralised position that distanced Irish culture from constructions of Europe and the West: “Irish identification with the ‘underdevelop[ed]’ Orient functions as a part of Irish nationalism and is integral to the process of Irish decolonization” (Lennon 2004, p. 265). Pound’s creative but orientalist adaptation of Chinese poetry (see Qian 2003) emerges thematically in The Moon in the Yellow River to contrast Tausch’s adherence to Western progress with other characters’ alternative understandings of Irish modernity. Notably, the character of Blake asserts more relational ways of being throughout the play, a point emphasised when Blake sings the play’s titular poem right before he is murdered by Lanigan, his former friend, who he fought with during the War of Independence, but who in the play works for the Free State police (Johnston 1979, pp. 158–62). By using music and poetry to insert Irish orientalist ideas and aesthetics prevalent in the early twentieth century into the play, Johnston points to competing worldviews that interact with and become audible through the aural environments of the play’s diegesis.

Sound elements in The Moon in the Yellow River inform and guide the characters’ debates about what progress is and whether industrialisation and expanding technologies contribute to freedom or subjugation. The stage directions at the start and end of Act One indicate the ongoing background noise: “Whenever the hall door is open, the distant hum of turbines can be heard” and “turbines hum merrily in the distance through the open door” (Johnston 1979, pp. 89, 116). Act One starts with Tausch knocking on Dobelle’s door, which receives a strong response from Agnes, who not only complains about Tausch’s knocking but also how “the clattering racket of them mechanicalisms out there” is negatively impacting people’s health, especially that of Mrs. Mulpeter, who silently suffers a difficult childbirth outside the play’s diegesis (Johnston 1979, p. 91). Despite entering a household and immediately encountering gendered domestic and reproductive labour hindered by the pervasive noise of the turbines, Tausch obtusely ignores Columba’s warning: “Ah yes, the turbines are humming merrily now. The dynamos are turning and the water piles up behind the sluices. You think you have done well. But you haven’t accounted for everything” (Johnston 1979, p. 103). Rather than heed Columba’s cautionary words, Tausch lauds “the machinery of democracy” and goes on to wax lyrical about German rationalism as he envisions Ireland’s technological modernisation: “I see in my mind’s eye this land of the future—transformed and redeemed by power—from the sordid trivialities of peasant life to something newer and better. Soon you will be a happy nation of free men—free not by the magic of empty formulae or by the colour of the coats you wear, but by the inspiration of power—power—power” (Johnston 1979, pp. 104, 109). Tausch’s seemingly religious commitment to an ambivalently electrical and authoritative “power” undermines his presumed rationality. Instead, it indicates, to quote Johnson, a “[f]aith in science [that] reached its apogee in the 1950s and 1960s, when governments around the world and across the ideological spectrum witnessed remarkable gains in health and prosperity through modern science and became convinced that research and big engineering projects—such as mega dams—could overcome most natural limitations” (Johnson 2024, p. 36). Dobelle critiques Tausch’s faith in progress and technology, however: “You wish to serve something you call progress. But progress—whatever it is—is never achieved by people like you who pursue it. Progress is the fruit of evil men, with sinister motives. You and your kind can only make misery” (Johnston 1979, p. 138). Dobelle sees an underlying faith in progress through technocratic expansions as causing suffering. This misery not only emerges through Agnes’s complaints about the noise and its impacts on reproductive labour but also becomes clear as the characters debate what modernisation looks, feels, and sounds like.

Tausch’s failure to register how the operation of his revered power station might be damaging becomes a topic of debate in Act Two as characters disagree about what progress means. In keeping with stereotypes of rationality, Tausch sees new technologies as advancements. Contrastingly, Blake asserts that such technologies reinforce social hierarchies: “Listen to the noise of your turbines and then come back and give me any adequate reason for it all. The rest of the world may be crazy, but there’s one corner of it yet, thank God, where you and your ludicrous machinery haven’t turned us all into a race of pimps and beggars” (Johnston 1979, pp. 126–27). The noisy machinery becomes an index of socio-economic divisions perpetuated and exacerbated by expanding energy extraction. Blake critiques the noise of the power station and associates it with processes and technologies that render people into wage labourers, which he equates with “beggars” being exploited by “pimps” (Johnston 1979, p. 127). This reference to “proletarians” emerges in the aftermath of labour disputes on the Shannon Scheme and as Johnston joined the Friends of Soviet Russia (Adams 2002, p. 108). The trade unions put pressure on the Cumann na nGaedheal government and Siemens to provide workers with a living wage and set new precedents for labour in independent Ireland, but their efforts failed (McCarthy 2004, pp. 39–41).

These historical labour disputes find an echo in Blake’s assessment that the power station and its noisy turbines not only fail to effect valuable forms of progress but also thwart alternative possibilities for Irish modernity. Blake describes a conception of progress that involves relationally interacting with the material environment to more fully embrace and “enjoy life”: “To me it is progress just to live—to live more consciously and more receptively. Herr Tausch, do you never see yourself as rather a ridiculous figure trying to catch life in a blast furnace?” (Johnston 1979, p. 127). Blake’s emphasis on living “more receptively” implicitly indicates using multiple senses to interact with one’s surroundings in ongoing relations that include more-than-human communities. Combined with his critique of noise, Blake’s repetition of “to live” cultivates the relational and multisensory engagement with material environments for which he advocates. Ironically, Tausch is unable to apprehend anything beyond the “blast furnace,” which he views as “just the thing that leaves us all the freer to enjoy life” (Johnston 1979, p. 127). While the kind of life Tausch would enjoy through the affordances of the blast furnace remains unclear, it would most certainly occlude the surrounding sounds of the environment. Tausch and Blake’s debate about labour and life thus juxtaposes noisy and anthropocentric extraction technologies with the ability to aurally attend to the more-than-human and multispecies world and to live “more receptively” with it.

This implicit attention about how different senses either promote or prevent different relationships with surrounding environments persists during a “public discussion” about whether the power station should be blown up. This debate appeals to, in Gregory et al.’s words, an “imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory” (Johnston 1979, p. 133; Gregory 1991, p. 378). Through the debate, multiple perspectives emerge, thereby demonstrating, to use Fischer’s words, that “[t]he play is a problem play, a ‘theatre of ideas’ in the German tradition” (Fischer 2015, p. 36). The different characters express competing understandings of progress and modernity as well as Irish and German drama-turgical tendencies. The performance of these ideas explicitly stages a contestation of social hierarchies perpetuated by singular understandings of what is modern or antimodern or what is human or nonhuman. Consequently, it demonstrates how rational debate ultimately fails to rise above the noise of the turbines to realise the relational, affective, and multispecies ontologies through which Blake defines progress.

Like Blake, Columba sees the power station as reinforcing social hierarchies through dependencies on technocrats who fail to value cultural practices or weigh the effects of their technologies against established moral value systems and material environments. While Columba explains that she has nothing against Tausch or the building of factories, she describes the power station as an addiction, saying that people “think that they can give them up at any time. But they never can. Never” (Johnston 1979, p. 134). Columba associates the power station with new forms of irrational and inescapable dependencies that mimic the colonial condition. Columba’s description of power as an addiction presciently foreshadows what Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie describe as the “data/energy nexus,” through which past development projects continue to inform expanding energy extraction and consumption projects today (Bresnihan and Brodie 2024, p. 108). These resource logics emerge in the labour conditions perpetuated by extraction and manufacturing that motivate Blake’s critique of proletarianism. They also appear in George’s description of industrialisation in Birmingham: “All those women and young girls having to work night and day, with their poor, pale, pasty faces that they have to make up with rouge and all that, brought tears to my eyes, old man. They ought to be kept out of doors and have proper homes of their own, you know. No life for young girls” (Johnston 1979, p. 135). Besides implicitly anticipating Éamon de Valera’s famous Raidió Éierann speech by more than a decade, George exposes how industry often exacerbates gender and social hierarchies. These reigning power relations alongside development coincide with what Hannah Arendt theorises as the social realm, in which the labour of surviving is brought out of the patriarchal private sphere and into the public realm, thereby implying equality among peers in wage labour systems but in actuality reinforcing gender and social hierarchies (Arendt [1958] 1998, p. 47). By connecting the depressed conditions for women labourers to the implied progress of electrification, The Moon in the Yellow River critically positions Tausch’s understandings of progress within a neocolonial frame that exacerbates interrelated colonial, social, and gender hierarchies.

Throughout these debates and the ensuing violence at the end of the play, the sound directions regularly indicate the “turbines hum merrily,” thereby implicitly foregrounding aural sensing as an important way of “liv[ing] more consciously and more receptively” with material and cultural surroundings (Johnston 1979, p. 127). This emphasis on aurality becomes strikingly clear in the silence that ensues after George and Potts’s homemade weapons accidentally blow up the power station (Johnston 1979, p. 155). Although this ending leads Rubenstein to critique the play for reinforcing stage Irish tropes, it also exposes material agencies beyond the control of human power. The spectacular forms of violence and noise to construct the dam and the insidious noise that persists thereafter call into question the implied progress of energy extraction technologies. Moreover, the silence left by the destruction of the power station ultimately allows intergenerational wounds to heal. After “a livid flash and a roar…followed by the sound of falling masonry…silence comes again and the sound of turbines is no more” (Johnston 1979, p. 155). The quiet in the play’s final scenes facilitates a reconciliation between Dobelle and Blánaid. Within this stillness, Dobelle is finally able to disentangle his feelings of resentment against his daughter, who was born as her mother died in childbirth. Without the sound of turbines, Dobelle can see his daughter, as though “meeting [her] […] for the first time” (Johnston 1979, p. 157). This need for quiet to visually observe indicates the necessity of a multisensory approach to inhabiting social and material environments that recalls Blake’s descriptions of living “more receptively” (Johnston 1979, p. 127). The culminating silence consequently demonstrates the failures of Tausch’s “righteousness,” which only led to division and rupture. Indeed, Johnston describes in the preface to his play that Tausch is “a Servant of Righteousness,” which the character of Dobelle sees as “the most dangerous people of all” (Johnston 1979, p. 85).

The play’s sounds and silences thus call into question connotations of technological advancements as they open the possibilities for alternative modernities in independent Ireland. The turbine noise invisibly impacts the aesthetic experiences, relationships, sensations, and actions of the characters. Despite the advanced forms of engineering necessary to terraform the lower River Shannon and create the dam at Ardnacrusha, the Shannon Scheme did not ameliorate social hierarchy or restore multispecies biodiversity in the aftermath of empire. Consequently, Johnston’s play shows how the destruction of the power station can indeed be read, as Dobelle’s opening to the 1947 radio version indicated, as a “comedy” or happy ending (Johnston 1947, p. 1). As Agnes returns to the house and Dobelle nods off to sleep, the play ends with Agnes “softly hum[ming] a lullaby” while dawn breaks, thereby offering a stark contrast to the humming of the turbines throughout the play and reinserting human bioacoustics back into the surrounding environment (Johnston 1979, p. 158). The quiet of this new day signifies new possibilities that resonate with Blake’s understandings of progress, in which “progress [is] just to live—to live more consciously and more receptively” (Johnston 1979, p. 127). As noise pollution and energy consumption intensify in the twenty-first century, The Moon in the Yellow River offers an early warning of how outwardly innocuous sounds of progress can deteriorate seemingly unbreakable family ties and occlude multisensory modes of apprehending material environments upon which all life depends. This engagement with the agency of noise and material environments becomes more explicit decades later in Frank Harvey’s Farewell to Every White Cascade.

3. They “Struck Dumb the Voice of the Falls”: Modernisation’s Silencing of the West in Frank Harvey’s Farewell to Every White Cascade

In 1957, the Irish government completed the Erne Hydroelectric Scheme, which involved a decades-long collaboration with Northern Ireland from the early 1940s through the 1950s to build two hydroelectric power stations at Cathaleen’s Fall and Cliff in Ballyshannon (Kennedy 2013, pp. x–xii). The hydropower stations on the River Erne became the second largest dam project in Ireland after Ardnacrusha (Kennedy 2013, p. x). Like the Shannon Scheme, the Erne Scheme greatly changed the surrounding environment, changes that are the focus of Francis Harvey’s 1958 radio play, Farewell to Every White Cascade, which premiered on RTÉ and was broadcast throughout the 1960s (Potts 2018, p. 92). Broadcast radio comprises and interacts with ephemeral electromagnetic pulses to transmit signals, thereby embedding a narrative about the river’s agency in a medium that is integrally interconnected with physical Earth systems (Poole 1999; Kahn 2013). As Selena Savić writes: “Radio signals […] can be ‘natural’ (i.e., solar storms) and ‘cultural’ (i.e., telecommunications); they are also ‘immaterial’ and yet able to transport information across space” (Savić 2024, p. 15). While these ephemeral environments may be invisible to humans, telecommunications and radio technologies facilitate the audition of both natural and manufactured radio waves, leading Douglas Kahn to state that “[r]adio was heard before it was invented” (Kahn 2013, p. 1). The genre of radio drama engages physically with these entangled environments and technologies to aurally construct the play’s diegesis. Through this medium, the sounds and dialogue of Farewell to Every White Cascade tell the story of the Erne Scheme as it also, in the words of Mark Peter Wright, “[c]onsider[s] the rights of sonic nature [to] hel[p] recognize the agential capacity of the medium as both actor and witness to events, entangled within human and nonhuman encounters rather than separated as a sonic resource” (Wright 2022, p. 51). Wright’s analysis of the field in field recordings helps to read the entanglement of human and more-than-human agencies in the medium and story of Harvey’s three-act radio drama. While sound pollution persists as one of the most easily fixable forms of environmental harm, it continues to pervade the air like carbon emissions, raising stress levels in humans and more-than-humans alike (Farina and Reid 2020, p. 1). Rather than an inexhaustible dumping ground for the noise of modernisation and modernity, Harvey’s radio play demonstrates how bio-acoustics are essential to all life. Heeding the aural environments in Farewell to Every White Cascade reveals material environments as co-producers of Irish heritage and literature. Together, humans and their environments create and shape memories of the past and the ability to imagine more enduring multispecies futures.

My analysis builds on the scholarship of Donna Potts, who is one of the few scholars to have examined Harvey’s radio play. Potts explores the poetic influences on Farewell to Every White Cascade, including from W. B. Yeats’s Cathleen Ní Houlihan and William Allingham’s poem, “The Winding Banks of Erne, or the Emigrant’s Adieu to Ballyshannon,” to elucidate forms of environmental protest in mid-century Ireland (Potts 2018, pp. 90–93). Focusing on territorial sovereignty and resource ownership as economic drivers in independent Ireland, Potts asserts that “[t]he Irish government’s exploitation and misuse of natural resources here and elsewhere for the sake of economic progress may be viewed as a form of neocolonialism” in which “Ballyshannon experienced unprecedented growth for a time, [before] it henceforth faced stagnation and decline. The station provided significant green energy, though at a price” (Potts 2018, pp. 91, 93). The price of this so-called “green energy” was not only the erasure of multispecies environments but also changing forever how people interacted with their surroundings. As my examination of Harvey’s radio drama will show, the medium of radio, the electrification of rural Ireland, and the noise of modernisation intensify the ongoing impacts of the occupation and dispossession of land. Farewell to Every White Cascade demonstrates how development projects to expand electricity were rapidly altering human and more-than-human relationships to place, understandings of modernity, and discourses of rights. By occupying the seemingly more ephemeral environment of the air, the sounds in Harvey’s radio play thematically and materially protest the Erne Scheme’s dispossession of rural Irish space and assert the need for sustaining biodiverse acoustics that honour the flourishing of all species.

Farewell to Every White Cascade relates how the building of the dam at Cathleen’s Fall generates industrial noise that ultimately darkens rather than illuminates the region as it silences the river’s agency and capacity to communicate. The play consists primarily of conversations between Richard Farran and his grandson, Terence. The Farrans live beside the river, but Richard is confined to his bed as his health declines. The sounds, smells, and sights of the river depicted in the dialogue and sound directions are gradually overtaken, however, by the sounds of construction and the overwhelming silence the hydroelectric dam imposes on the riparian environment. The dialogue and sound directions construct a diegesis for the play that tasks audiences with imagining what once existed, as Assaroe Falls had already been submerged by the airing of Harvey’s play (Potts 2018, p. 93). The play’s medium and sounds challenge visual understandings of landscapes and foreground how aural reverberations across multispecies environments are a way through which the river asserts agency.

Rather than the visual rationalisation of space, Farewell to Every White Cascade aurally offers alternative approaches to modernity, tradition, property rights, and intergenerational dependencies through valuing and listening to and, as Wright puts it (building on Tina Campt), “listening with” the more-than-human world (Wright 2022). In addition to the story and the play’s sound directions critiquing anthropocentric forms of modernisation, Farewell to Every White Cascade explores changing relationships with surrounding environments through the medium of radio. The aurality of radio taps into oral cultures and the sound elements of poetry and drama as radio uses the electricity extracted from rivers and bogs in mid-century Ireland. Through writing and broadcasting this play, Harvey renders these Irish environments into an artwork that governments might seek to preserve, thereby calling attention to the way the land is not only a space from which to extract economic value but also a keeper of cultural heritage embedded within multispecies and environmental relationships.

The invisibility of aural environments connects potential listeners of this radio drama with the bedridden Richard, who cannot get up to look out. Richard regularly calls on Terence to describe what he sees through the window as sound directions indicate “the sound of blinds flapping in the breeze from the open window” (Harvey 1958, p. 13). Rather than explicitly depict the sounds flowing through the window, the play offers an opening that heightens attention to the idea of, to use Wright’s guiding question, “what am I not hearing?” (Wright 2022, p. 42). The river’s smells and sounds communicate with Richard through the open window: “That’s the sound of the river all right. It never stops and it never changes—like the sound of the sea. (He inhales deeply). I can smell the strange smell of the river and the smell of the damp grass in the field, too. Is it good this year, Terence?” (Harvey 1958, p. 13). Richard knows that it will be a productive year for the river field because he has learned to read the river’s sounds and smells. These aural and olfactory signs have become a part of his ongoing communication with his surroundings. Indeed, Richard’s relationship with the riparian environment has constructed his identity and ability to thrive: “I remember the sound of the river as long as I can remember anything, the last thing I heard when I went to sleep, the first thing when I wakened in the morning” (Harvey 1958, p. 19, emphasis in original). The river’s flow offers a consistency that Richard registers in his memory, pointing out that he could not sleep when working in Dublin because he “couldn’t hear the sound of the river going over the falls,” an absence Terence has also felt when visiting his aunt (Harvey 1958, pp. 19–20). This emphasis on the continuous sounds of and multisensorial communication with the river demonstrates entangled human and more-than-human worlds that the play’s medium and story collectively reflect.

While no recording of Farewell to Every White Cascade exists, the script includes descriptive sound directions and dialogue that recognise the agency of the river. The river’s ability to speak emerges in the play’s numerous references to poetry, including in the title’s reference to Allingham’s famous poem. Richard describes that “the sound of the river [is]…like the voice of someone praying, praying all the time, day and night, for all eternity. (Deprecatingly) But that noise, that noise!” (Harvey 1958, p. 20). Although the construction noise occludes the voice of the river, the sounds of the river inflect in Allingham’s poetry. Richard tells Terence how Allingham wrote his poetry by the river, implicitly indicating how the river contributed to the act of writing and to the poems (Harvey 1958, pp. 13–14). When Terence asks his grandfather if he ever wrote poetry, Richard responds by describing how the act of listening is poetry: “But it was a kind of poetry, too, to just sit there listening to the roar of the rushing waters and feeling the spray wet on your face and you down there alone by the river with your own thoughts like caged birds in your head, trying to leap out singing into the light of day as grand poetic words and phrases” (Harvey 1958, pp. 28–29). Richard and the river collectively produce “a kind of poetry,” thereby recognising the material environment as a collaborator and agent that can pray, produce complex acts of language, and interact with human communities. Farewell to Every White Cascade implicitly aligns the river with renowned poets like Yeats and Allingham to invisibly but materially inform and envelop terrestrial and aqueous habitats, memory, heritage, language, and culture. While the Irish government actively sought to preserve and value Irish literature and language, it only recognised their human authors rather than more-than-human collaborators. Material environments were valued when harnessed in economic production or when they were memorialised in a poem for human consumption. Farewell to Every White Cascade contests this anthropocentric focus in development and cultural preservation. Divisions of sacrifice and preservation sever humans from the more-than-human world, a severance that becomes strikingly clear as the stone upon which Allingham sat to write poetry is pushed into the river before the falls are blasted away and submerged forever (Harvey 1958, p. 28). Allingham’s poem and Harvey’s radio play memorialise the agential river and riparian environment in literary representations, as the material environments they depict are destroyed to facilitate a future focused only on human interests.

Through engaging more-than-human agencies in the story, Harvey asserts competing approaches to progress and modernity. While Richard and Terence implicitly claim progress as building on and expanding the farm and lifeways associated with the family’s relationship to the land, Richard’s son, John, accepts the dam as progress for the nation and defends the development project being prioritised over the continuity of the family farm. John critiques Richard’s refusal to sell the field he worked so hard to purchase by devaluing his relationship with his more-than-human surroundings: “No matter what you do they’ll have the field […] I see your reasons for wanting to keep the field and I understand how you feel, but (strongly) they’re sentimental reasons, and you know as well as me that sentiment doesn’t mix in a deal like this. These things must happen. And one single man can’t hold up the whole country just because he wants to keep a field at all costs” (Harvey 1958, p. 25, emphasis in original). These tensions between seemingly rational and “sentimental” understandings of competing modernities recall Tausch and Blake’s divergent conceptions of progress in The Moon in the Yellow River. Harvey’s play invokes the seemingly inevitable linear logic of Western rationality and technocratic progress narratives through John, who identifies with “a younger generation […] that watched the Shannon Scheme grow and the Dublin airport and all the other new industries” (Harvey 1958, pp. 25–26). Tensions between tradition and modernity, past and present, and preservation and development occlude multisensory ways of apprehending and interacting with visible and invisible environments and tangible and intangible cultural heritage.

The division between the rationalisation of material environments and the more-than-human entanglements implicit in John and Richard’s respective understandings of progress reveals contested positions on what the postcolonial state ostensibly protects and preserves. In Act One, as the developers are surveying the area, Richard blames his son for not telling them to get off the land, saying: “It’s no different to any other kind of trespassing” (Harvey 1958, p. 9). John disagrees, pointing out to his father that “[t]hese men have a right to go in and out. We can’t stop them any more than we can stop the river flowing” (ibid., emphasis in original). John naturalises the development of the dam and the inevitability of certain understandings of progress that legal frameworks protect through rights and property laws. In the final act of Farewell to Every White Cascade, Richard appeals to the law to assert his property rights, only to have the land legally confiscated, as John explains: “It’s a confiscation order for the river field, all good and legal, and it’s the final word on the whole thing” (Harvey 1958, p. 38). Defeated, Richard tears up the order as John leaves. Development appears unstoppable and even natural through the way in which laws are written to justify the erasure and terraforming of multispecies environments and people’s relationships with them.

The impossibility of stopping or redirecting development arises in the sound directions, which insert the noise of building the hydropower station as the story exposes the rising dam to block the light to—rather than to electrically illuminate—Richard’s room. As Richard complains about the light disappearing, he asks Terence to open the window again. This time, the sound directions offer a richly descriptive combination of construction noise and sound from the river: “Sound of the window being opened and then the din and clamour of men and machines at work on the dam. The noise rises and falls in an irregular rhythm and in the intervals of comparative quiet the noise of the river plunging over the falls may be heard” (Harvey 1958, pp. 18–19). This combination of construction noise and the sound of flowing water indicates changes to bioacoustics as it reframes the value human communities attribute to material environments and their development to serve human comfort. The sound directions in Farewell to Every White Cascade, to quote Wright, establish “[s]onic fictions [that] rupture and reterritorialize aesthetic norms, affirm the agency of cultures and communities previously colonized, and reinvent what sonic knowledge is or can be” (Wright 2022, p. 75). Indeed, before Assaroe Falls are blasted away forever, the sound directions indicate a “[c]omplete silence except for the sound of the river plunging over the falls” (Harvey 1958, p. 30). Richard notes that it is “very quiet all of a sudden—even with the window shut. Listen, there’s a blackbird started to sing down in the planting,” to which Terence responds: “There’s hardly a sound except the river and the blackbird” (ibid.). The sound directions describe the ensuing blast as “deafening” as it “shakes the whole house,” and “a huge boulder tears through the ceiling and buries itself in the floor beside the bed” (Harvey 1958, p. 31). The description of the blast as “deafening” does not just apply to the normative hearing of the characters and listeners. It also points to how the anthropocentric developments to material landscapes silence multispecies bioacoustics and aural environments, a motif that recurs in McPherson’s The Weir.

This entanglement of people and their environments becomes clear as construction sacrifices Richard and the river to promote certain ideas of national progress. Terence repeatedly bears witness to the eradication of his grandfather’s agency, which depends on the river. The blast silences the river and falls, and Terence cries: “Listen! O, listen! O, granda, listen! The river! The sound of the river is gone! Oh, granda, they’ve blasted away the falls for ever! The river! The River!,” and Richard replies: “The river…..the river…the sound of the river is gone…..gone for ever…” (Harvey 1958, p. 32). Terence and Richard focus on the sound of the river rather than the scene of the blast. The repetition of “the river” aurally fills the space where the sounds of the riparian environment once flowed. While Act Three shows Richard continuing his struggle against the developers from his deathbed, he passes as the river falls silent and as his ancestral home is submerged under the rising waters of the reservoir. When the waters rise, Terence desperately appeals to his grandfather: “Can’t you do something? You said you would” (Harvey 1958, p. 44, emphasis in original). But Richard cannot. He can hardly speak, as his agency and voice are inextricably entangled with his surroundings. He literally cannot live without the river. These entangled subjectivities remind listeners of human interdependencies with more-than-human worlds, including in the radio waves reverberating through the air to broadcast the play.

Before he dies, Richard gets up to look out the window. He calls on his grandson to remember the river field, the house where his great-grandparents lived, and the sounds and smells of the region. These memories echo in the play’s ending, which returns to Allingham’s poem. The sounds of the riparian environment continue to resonate and make meaning in Irish literature even as the agency of the river is obscured and silenced by the noise pollution of the dam’s construction and operation. By concluding the play with this poem, Harvey points to the silenced river’s sounds and agency that persist in cultural representations, including Farewell to Every White Cascade. This encapsulation of the river indicates the potential of literature to not only commemorate lost environments but also record and communicate important forms of information that material environments and multispecies bioacoustics once shared with human communities. Multiple layers of memory in the dialogue and the regular returns to Allingham’s poem reconstruct the river’s agency in radio broadcasts to show the necessity of more-than-human communication systems and ephemeral environments for flourishing human societies and cultural heritage.

Harvey’s emphasis on changing aural environments in rural Ireland exposes multisensory shifts that interrogate the value systems undergirding mid-century postcolonial modernisation schemes. As hydropower continues to be seen as a form of renewable or supposedly “green” energy, Harvey’s play challenges the resource logics underpinning energy extraction and the dumping of noise pollution indiscriminately into ephemeral aerial and aquatic environments. Numerous references to the sounds and smells of the surrounding environment throughout the play emphasise all that is lost by the construction of the dam, but the memory of the place embedded in Allingham’s poem, as well as in Harvey’s play, promises to preserve the river that once flowed. By memorialising the river in literature, the possibilities for honouring material agency in more enduring futures emerge. As recent dam removal programmes have demonstrated, opportunities for honouring thriving bioacoustics exist even after destructive forms of colonial and neocolonial anthropocentric modernisation and extraction projects (Mauer 2020). Yet until projects for regenerating riparian environments occur, stories of places no longer heard or seen haunt the rural soundscape, a haunting that resonates throughout McPherson’s The Weir.

4. “You Can Put the Radio on”: Suppressing the Silence of Modernity in Conor McPherson’s The Weir

Whereas whirring turbines and construction noise play foundational roles in Johnston and Harvey’s plays, silence has descended across rural Ireland in McPherson’s 1997 play, The Weir. Set in a rural pub on the upper Shannon, four local men (Jack, Jim, Brendan, and Finbar) and a woman from Dublin (Valerie) convene for an evening of stories. Potts asserts that “[t]he play, which is about contested colonial landscapes, is also about contested natural resources” (Potts 2018, p. 89). She notes that “[b]y the end of the twentieth century, the ecological ramifications of the harnessing of water for electrical power have become increasingly clear. The Weir, set in County Leitrim, depicts a world in which water has been stripped of all spiritual associations, its only conceivable purpose to generate power” (Potts 2018, p. 90). Potts positions The Weir in relation to Harvey’s Farewell to Every White Cascade to explore how these plays inform environmental movements about contested natural resources. Building on Potts, my analysis of elements of silence, visual depictions, and electricity in The Weir revises and expands how scholars approach cultural representations of changing landscapes and contested natural resources through a sustained attention to sound.

While the title of The Weir suggests a play about a dam, visual depictions of a weir near Jamestown, County Leitrim, form a literal backdrop to the story: “On the wall, back, are some old black and white photographs; a ruined abbey; people posing near a newly erected ESB weir; a town in a cove with mountains around it” (McPherson 2004, p. 12; Dean 2025, p. 6). This subtle addition to the setting emphasises the quiet of the region through the silent medium of photography. The capture of the hydropower development in a visual medium implicitly recalls the silence imposed on the River Erne that Harvey’s Farewell to Every White Cascade depicts. It also emphasises a prioritisation of visual aesthetics that contrasts with McPherson’s portrayal of oral stories, as Eamonn Jordan explains: “In Ireland, people tend to exchange stories more than they involve themselves in discussion or debate” (Jordan 2004, p. 358). While this prominence of storytelling might seem to diverge from the public debate staged in The Moon in the Yellow River, the conversation and stories in The Weir similarly rely on elements that Jordan describes as a “meta-pastoral,” which “provides relatively free-speaking, communal spaces, where burdens can be shared, questions asked with concern, and personal issues are within the public domain” and “where stories manage to part-explain, reconfigure and enact the past, offer it a coherence, and delineate how one positions oneself within the living structures” (Jordan 2004, pp. 356, 366). Each character in McPherson’s play takes turns recounting events that changed their lives, while “the living structures” of their surroundings have been shaped by the events depicted on the wall of the pub.

The black-and-white photographs position the dam in a seemingly outdated medium upon which the characters gaze from their more modernised present. They briefly discuss the photos at the start of the play, with the local men pointing out the people they know to the newcomer from Dublin. The set directions and this early dialogue establish a multimodal interaction between the characters in the present and the past that the photographs on the wall silently represent. The building of power stations on the Rivers Shannon and Erne forever altered the environment, and these kinds of energy extraction projects are a foundational part of the diegesis of the play through how they implicitly define the surrounding region. Unlike the turbines and blasts from Johnston and Harvey’s plays, McPherson’s play does not refer further to dams but rather to what dams enabled: electric lights, radio broadcasts, and the silencing of nonhuman bioacoustics. Additionally, the title and opening of the play position the power station as an overarching part of the construction of the region. The set design of The Weir inverts the myth that the more-than-human and multispecies worlds are merely scenography for human activity. McPherson’s play implicitly and meta-critically comments on this myth by presenting histories of anthropocentric development as a literal backdrop to the environments in the play. While The Weir presents the dam as a setting for the ghostly occurrences the characters recount, it subtly reveals the agential environments silenced in Farewell to Every White Cascade to push back and assert the inextricable entanglement of human and environmental histories. Through positioning humans within more-than-human environments and histories, The Weir resists human–nonhuman and modern–antimodern binaries to critique anthropocentric forms of development and assert the need for alternative understandings of modernisation that account for multispecies interdependencies.

These multispecies interdependencies come into sharp relief in the aural environments the play describes and depicts. The changing aural environments of the region play a role in the first story that the characters share with each other. Jack tells a ghost story about a local family, in which Bridie and her daughter Maura hear an inexplicable knocking at the door. Natural and supernatural sounds intermingle in Jack’s story, as Jordan points out: “His story is a response to the sounds and noises of the natural world as if these confirmed the presence of the supernatural. The wind was like ‘someone singing’” (Jordan 2004, p. 360). While Jordan explores gendered elements of naturalising the supernatural in the men’s stories through how they delineate forms of inclusion and exclusion in the local community, my examination of the aurality of these natural–supernatural elements indicates material agencies like those depicted in Farewell to Every White Cascade. The supernatural knocking at the door occurs in the early twentieth century when the imperial land-reform agency, the Congested Districts Board (CDB), was rationalising space in the west of Ireland through enclosure, building new roads and houses, and relocating people to new farms. It is unclear when the house in Jack’s story was built, but modernising housing was an explicit project of the CDB (Breathnach 2007, p. 179). The Weir implicitly shows these modernisation projects to have come into conflict with existing more-than-human infrastructures. The house, Jack recounts, was built on a fairy road, which ran from Brendan’s top field, where the fairy fort was, down through an old well, a fifteenth-century abbey, and to the water (McPherson 2004, p. 37). The knocking at the door points to ubiquitous but often ignored more-than-human agencies, reminding audiences, as Amitav Ghosh puts it, of “the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors” (Ghosh 2016, p. 30). These environmental agencies are often obscured by the faith in technocratic science that Tausch demonstrated in The Moon on the Yellow River or the naturalising of development that John Farran asserted in Farewell to Every White Cascade. While the knocking first occurred alongside imperial-era land reforms led by the CDB, it occurs again in the 1950s as the Erne Scheme was carried out and as the weir in the play’s diegesis is constructed. As both dams were built in the 1950s, the knocking recurred and a “fierce load of dead birds all in the hedge” appeared (McPherson 2004, p. 37). Unlike the blackbird singing before the blast in Farewell to Every White Cascade, the dead birds in The Weir indicate the eradication of multispecies environments as they also ominously foreshadow human futures. Jack’s story memorialises these seemingly inexplicable events in a ghost story and consequently also in McPherson’s play. A rational and scientific view might interpret such events as coincidences, but attending to the sounds and silences in the play indicates more-than-human material agencies speaking back to the changes that anthropocentric development projects impose on multispecies relations in the region.

Unlike the aural environments that speak and co-author literature with humans in Harvey’s play, the silent landscape in The Weir becomes a place of loneliness and unbearable quiet. Jack asks the pub owner, Brendan, if he would make space in his field to host the caravans of tourists. Like the dammed river photographically depicted on the wall, the field becomes a resource that can be used to earn money. Despite the possible profits, Brendan is unsure he could return to the quiet after the families leave: “Yeah. If you had all…the families out there. On their holliers. And all the kids and all. You’d feel the evenings turning. When they’d be leaving. And whatever about how quiet it is now. It’d be fucking shocking quiet then. (Short pause.) You know?” (McPherson 2004, p. 23). Brendan considers the way the sounds of the families would make the place seem to come alive again. The activity of the families would conceal the quiet of the land. Brendan hesitates not with a fear of the noise but rather because of how loud the silence would feel after the families go home. This silent landscape recalls E. O. Wilson’s concept of the Eremocene, or the Age of Loneliness, which, as Luz Mar González-Arias writes, is “the bleakness awaiting humanity if we continue changing the environment to meet our most immediate needs. […] The Age of Loneliness speaks to the utter solitude humans will be doomed to if there are no flora and fauna to reciprocate and balance their lives” (González-Arias 2015, p. 119). The Weir offers a taste of “the bleakness awaiting humanity” in the eerie quiet that comes when humans have built everything for themselves to the eradication of all the multispecies relationships that sustain human life.

As the characters each tell the stories that either brought them to the region or that haunt the surrounding landscape, they notice an omnipresent silence indicative of the Eremocene. After Finbar tells his story about a ghost that chased away his neighbours, he conveys that he moved into Carrick, “down into the lights,” as Jack puts it, because he “[d]idn’t want the loneliness” (McPherson 2004, p. 44). Valerie sympathises: “I’d imagine though, it can get very quiet” (ibid.). This idea that silence and loneliness pervade the surrounding environment corresponds to the electrification of the region, allowing light and electronics to visually occlude the silence. Indeed, Jim offers Finbar a possible solution to fill the silence and ameliorate his loneliness: “You can put the radio on” (ibid.). Just before Jim offers this option, however, Finbar briefly exits the diegesis. The fact that Finbar cannot hear Jim’s advice inserts irony into the text, a point emphasised by an ensuing pause. The pervasive silence and isolation are impossible to escape despite having “company all around” or access to electronic and wireless devices that might distract from the loneliness (ibid.). The idea of moving “into the lights” or “put[ting] the radio on” to conceal the silence of biodiversity loss indicates histories of rural electrification that the characters implicitly discuss while looking at the photographs of the weir at the start of the play. These distractions and histories collectively recall Columba’s speech about creating an addictive dependence on power in The Moon in the Yellow River. The electricity and devices that increasingly divert attention away from aural and multispecies environments in the twenty-first century indicate what Lauren Berlant theorises as “cruel optimism [which] names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is […] too possible, and toxic” (Berlant 2010, p. 94). As data centres rapaciously consume energy and freshwater, such persistent “cruel optimism” inflects the themes of haunting, quiet, and electrification in The Weir. These themes raise questions about the lasting material and cultural impacts of anthropocentric modernisation schemes, not only on multispecies environments but also on people who find themselves increasingly in, to use González-Arias’s words, “utter solitude” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (González-Arias 2015, p. 119).

Instead of resisting dependencies on anthropocentric developments, the characters in The Weir try to keep each other company while being unable to name or fully comprehend the source of their loneliness. The Weir’s ghost stories tease out the echoes of material agencies that once populated the region while also obscuring the resounding silence for the evening. In Valerie’s story, these agencies indicate extinction through the literal end of a family line. Valerie describes her daughter’s unexpected and tragic death and relates how she later received a telephone call from the frightened ghost of her daughter (McPherson 2004, pp. 57–60). The characters try to accept or clarify the disembodied voice in Valerie’s story as something supernatural or explicable. Yet in either case, Valerie’s daughter had already passed away in a swimming accident by the time the phone rang, and her disembodied fears and voice consequently express more-than-human echoes resounding through ephemeral aural environments and analogue audition technologies. As Kahn explains, the telephone was the first technology on which aural environments from Earth systems became audible to hearing human ears: “[R]eceiving radio may mean that someone is listening but not always that anyone is sending” (Kahn 2013, p. 1). While Valerie uses the quiet landscape to escape urban life, process her grief, and try to build a new life, the pervasive silence and material agencies in McPherson’s play challenge the possibility of escape into the implied antimodern pastoral simplicity of rural life. Jordan interprets the rural setting of McPherson’s play to depict a pastoral space where “simplicity confirms authenticity because it gives access to certain ways of being, modes of understanding, and structures of integrity” (Jordan 2004, p. 355). Yet attending to sounds and silences in The Weir expands this reading. The aural environments in The Weir show the seemingly pastoral setting to signify not peace and quiet but rather the eerie silence of extinction.

Indeed, the pastoral elements in The Weir point to silenced bioacoustics across urban and rural divides through anthropocentric modernisation projects. Expanding digital infrastructure and technologies promise to increase connections and amplify marginalised voices while their environmental impact also threatens to eradicate bioacoustics, including those of everyday exchanges and stories in human communities. The Weir consequently brings human bioacoustics into focus to challenge the silence that anthropocentric forms of development impose on multispecies relations and auralities. Since 1958, Ireland has undergone multiple modernisation projects and the privatisation of natural resources that have capitulated to neocolonial and US-led petro-economies. The Weir exposes how such developments untether human and more-than-human entanglements, leaving only echoes and silences across digital and material environments. Although The Weir registers material agencies that continue to haunt humanity’s present and future, its quiet and lonely landscape shows the silencing of more-than-human environments in histories of anthropocentric development. Through aural environments, The Weir indicates multisensory possibilities for perceiving and honouring vital interconnections among humans, more-than-humans, and material environments.

5. Conclusions: From Electrification to Recreation

The sounds of modernisation remain a relatively understudied aspect of art and literature outside of sound studies. Yet analysing aural environments in Irish drama opens interpretation to multisensory and multimodal meanings. Examining the noise of turbines in Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River, the blasts and multispecies communications in Harvey’s Farewell to Every White Cascade, and the silences of the rural landscape in McPherson’s The Weir sharpens scholarly attention to multisensory indicators of environmental and cultural thriving and decline. The aural environments in these plays reveal material environments in the land, air, and water to assert agency and cultivate intergenerational connections, thereby shaping human cultures and histories. Johnston’s play indicates the disruption of life and labour through the noise of the turbines. The spontaneous explosion at the end of the play reestablishes an aural environment in which intergenerational healing can occur. These intergenerational connections reemerge in Harvey’s play as Richard tasks Terence with remembering the voice of the river that helped to co-create Irish poetry. The silenced riparian environment reverberates decades later in the seemingly supernatural events in The Weir, where a looming extinction resounds across the land, water, and telecommunications networks. While the characters tell ghost stories, they implicitly narrate biodiversity loss and the ensuing loneliness resulting from anthropocentric development schemes. Collectively, these plays indicate how literature and culture arise in ongoing interactions between humans and their material and multispecies environments. These interactions break down the myth of human–nonhuman divisions upon which colonial and anthropocentric forms of development rely. Rather, the aural environments in these plays indicate how more-than-human material environments, species, and agencies play active roles in co-authoring literature and culture together with human collaborators.

By examining aural environments in these three plays, this article expands scholarly approaches to modernisation in Irish studies as it considers how seemingly green technologies for extracting power, like hydroelectric dam projects, emerge in implicit representations of multispecies environments in twentieth-century literature. The construction of the dam in Farewell to Every White Cascade sacrificed the region’s biodiversity, but The Weir indicates how the damaged environment is repurposed for human recreation and as a holiday destination. Like Dobelle’s references to expanding forms of ecotourism and hiking at the start of the 1947 radio version of The Moon in the Yellow River, the repurposing of once industrialised areas into outdoor recreation for humans persists across Europe, where, for example, landscapes devastated by open pit mines are regularly submerged under seemingly scenic lakes (Lo 2024; Sullivan 2016; Truijen et al. 2025, pp. 27–29). Longer histories of visual representations conceal extraction zones into aesthetically pleasing spaces for human enjoyment. The idea of rendering a degraded environment into a park exposes the persistent focus on anthropocentric development in industry and in the creation of supposedly “natural” spaces. These consumable landscapes and waterways may be visually appealing, but aural environments reveal the silence of an era in which humans are increasingly the only ones left.

Revisiting Johnston, Harvey, and McPherson’s plays through an attention to sound shows the often-invisible environmental impacts of anthropocentric modernisation. Such auditory attention avoids reductive modern–antimodern and human–nonhuman readings. The either–or logic of these binaries persists in understandings of Western modernisation or romanticised pastoralism, both of which rely on shaping or eradicating multispecies lifeways and environments to meet the needs and desires of select groups of humans. Attending to aural environments broadens methods and theoretical frameworks for studying the ways literature draws on material environments to imagine potential alternatives to colonial and neocolonial forms of development that continue to expand across postcolonial regions around the world. As the planet experiences its sixth extinction event and as human societies transcend multiple planetary boundaries of a habitable Earth, heeding aural environments in Irish literature expands the affective and sensory possibilities for redressing and honouring multispecies environments while adapting to a changing world.