The Paul Brock Interview – Part 5: Working with Shannon Development

Athlone Miscellany

By Gearoid O’Brien

The Paul Brock Interview – Part 5: Working with Shannon Development

The late 1950s and early 60s were exciting times for Paul Brock. He was getting plenty of engagements to perform both at home and abroad but he also had his eye on the things which were happening in Ireland. One of the big developments was “The [First] Programme for Economic Expansion” the brain child of T.K. Whittaker which was introduced as an attempt to modernise the Irish economy. This was also the era of Sean Lemass as Taoiseach, and his readiness to support Whitaker’s White Paper proposal on ‘Economic Development’ in November 1958 brought about the beginnings of a turn around in the Irish economy.

Whitaker’s aim was to “accelerate progress by strengthening public confidence after the stagnation of the 1950s, indicating the opportunities for development and encouraging a progressive and expansionist outlook”. Whitaker told the Government “we must be prepared to take risks under all headings – social, commercial and financial – if we are to succeed”. As a result of the adoption of his plan the value of exports in 1960 was the highest for thirty years. We could do with this same breadth of vision today.

Shannon Development

While Paul Brock was being kept busy with the music he realised that there was no money in music and certainly not enough to live on. So when Ireland was riding on the crest of the wave Paul left Athlone, but he did not leave the Shannon behind him. He journeyed to Shannon and joined Shannon Development in 1963. The company, an Irish Government economic development agency, was still in its infancy and Paul considered himself very lucky to be working for an exciting new company which had government support and which was being run at that time by Brendan O’Regan, whom he refers to as “a visionary”. Paul describes the dynamism of O’Regan who he says “had the vision to do a lot of things across a wide spectrum: economic development, tourism, attraction of inward development; building of local communities; infrastructural developments and maintaining the importance of Shannon as an international airport. Remember that from the late 1950s Shannon had been over-flown with the arrival of the modern jet aircraft. Up to that time, from the post-war years until the late 50s, all the air traffic between Europe and America had to stop at Shannon to refuel. So I joined the company with O’Regan as the driving force he had an attitude of ‘let’s do it’ and he didn’t want to know about bureaucracy or red tape. He managed to motivate a huge team of people who would do anything for him. There were no lines of demarcation these kinds of road-blocks just didn’t exist in his mind with the result that the company was responsible for an extraordinary number of innovations at that time. Shannon Development became the green-house for economic development not just in Ireland but in a lot of other countries who were seeing how things were beginning to turn around in Ireland”. Over the years Paul worked across lots of the company’s business activities: in tourism, in industrial development, in enterprise development and as Publicity Communications Manager. Eventually he was responsible for all of the company’s overseas operations. His work involved a great deal of overseas travel and so for over forty years he has been based in the Shannon region both in Limerick and in Ennis where he has lived for the past twenty-five years.

He has served on a variety of national and regional economic development committees including: the National Aerospace Task Force; The Mid-West Resource Committee; The National Grants Committee of the Youth Employment Agency. Paul is a former Chairman of the National Publicity Co-ordinating Committee that operated under the aegis of The Department of Foreign Affairs and which co-ordinated the worldwide publicity work of all the Irish State promotional agencies. In recent years he has worked as a Senior Consultant for IDI Ireland advising on investment promotion programmes in various countries in Africa, South America and Eastern Europe.

A Career Choice

In going to Shannon Paul Brock had made an important career choice. The options facing him were either to pursue the music or concentrate on the job. He didn’t think the music was a real option as it might be today, and in truth it wasn’t so he opted on getting a secure job that was both permanent and pensionable. As he says himself “it was important to get your foot in the door and keep it there. The notion of mobility within jobs didn’t exist then so I took the decision to concentrate on my career in Shannon but of course I continued to be involved in various ways with the music”.

Once he established himself in Shannon he realised that his primary focus had to be on his day job but he continued to play music. He even developed an interest in the guitar and studied the classical guitar for a while. He continued to broaden his musical tastes by listening to as much music as possible. By the early 70s he was aware that the attitude to Irish music was changing The Chieftains, a group which had been founded in the early 60s, was getting very well established and was increasingly playing Irish music worldwide. This was in great contrast to the majority of Irish musicians who played simply for the love of it and seldom if ever got paid for their efforts. Paul recalls that when the big break came and Irish musicians started to seize the opportunity to travel they had to learn the hard way about the art of performance to live international audiences. He remembers one music critic in the States asking ‘Why do Irish musicians spend so much time admiring their own shoe laces?”

The traditional Irish musicians of the time were on a steep learning curve. Prior to this they weren’t into the business of communicating, performing in front of large audiences, engaging with their audience or introducing their own material. However as they acquired new skills and reached out to new audiences there was growing acceptance both at home and abroad of Irish traditional music and significantly more and more young people being were being drawn into it in a way that hadn’t happened previously. The whole Fleadh Cheoil business was flourishing and attracting more and more people and the recording industry was taking off in Ireland.

Going Back to his Roots

While we were talking about the changing scene in the 70s Paul tells me “I was continuing to play with various musicians but more and more I was going back to the Irish traditional material, going back to my roots as it were. I dispensed with the five-row accordion; I actually sold it and returned to my roots to the melodeon and the two-row accordion. Around that time there was a great reawakening of interest in what had gone before. There was a lot of research being done, through the 1970s in particular, on the early development of traditional music. There was interest in the early recordings and in what had happened in America especially through the nineteenth century the time of mass emigration from Ireland. There was an interest in how the music transported, what had happened to it when it got out there and particularly the development of the recording industry because that had happened in America”.

Lecture on the Golden Age of Irish Music

I learned a great deal about the Golden Age of Irish music from Paul Brock. One character he told me about was the Loughrea born piper, Patsy Tuohy, who in the early days of the recording business in the States set up a mail-order company. He invited his customers to nominate the pieces of music they wanted, say two favourite tunes such as ‘Bonnie Kate’ and ‘The Salamanca Reel’ – Patsy would then record them on to a wax cylinder on a one-off basis, autograph them and dispatch them by post.

Irish traditional music became a commercial commodity in the States. Various factors, including the recording industry, the dance halls and the birth of broadcasting all helped its growing popularity. Paul explains the importance of the early recordings “The American Library of Congress compiled a discography of all the ethnic recordings of Irish music from the beginnings until 1950 and we then knew for the first time what was there, what had been recorded, who was on the recordings, when they were recorded and where they were recorded – this amounted to an absolute goldmine shedding light on both the repertoire and style of these pioneer musicians”. Paul Brock has delivered an illustrated lecture in the States entitled “Irish Traditional Music in America – The Golden Age” of which Paul F Wells, the Director of the Centre for Popular Music at the Middle Tennessee State University said it was “concise, authoritative, and engagingly presented. It was a wonderful survey of a vastly important period in the history of Irish music”.