Danger! 'Tunnel Tigers' at work

From one tiny Irish island, they have dug their way
around the world...

By John Dodd.
© Reproduced by kind permission from The Reader's Digest

Among the office workers crowding the pavements of Borough High Street in south London at lunch-time, Laurence Gallagher keeps bumping into people he knows. On the corner, we shake hands with a workman in a lime-green reflective jacket. "That's my wife's cousin," he says. "Have you met Gerry? He lives a few doors down from me," he says of another carrying a construction worker's safety helmet in the spring sunshine. We go around another corner. "Meet Derek. He's the general foreman here. He's got two boys on the job." Then we pick our way 30 feet below ground and stare down into the great cast-iron ribcage of what will form the three-way escalator at the new London Bridge underground station. "Look, there's one of his boys working by the digger," says Gallagher. "You'll meet the other one down the tunnel."

Gallagher could just as easily have been leaning over a fence 400 miles away and talking to the same people. All these men working on the £2.6 billion Jubilee Line extension hail fro the same small Irish island, Arranmore, three miles off the County Donegal coast. And they are famous around the world for one thing-their extraordinary skill at digging tunnels. Although Arranmore has never been renowned for its mathematical exactness, locals estimate that as many as 160 men, out of a total population of 596 at the latest official count, have worked on the Jubilee Line over the past three and a half years. Every continent has at least one tunnel gouged out by the sweat and stamina of the Gallaghers, Boyles, O'Donnells, Bonners, Rodgers and Conlons of Arranmore, the fathers and grandfathers of Laurence Gallagher and his men. Close family ties and shared dangers make them a fiercely integrated and cohesive force wherever they go.

Arranmore men dug one of the first Scottish hydro-electric plants in the mid-1920s, the Queens and Brooklyn tunnels under New York's East River in the 1930s and '40s, colliery shafts throughout northern England, London Underground's Victoria Line. Joseph "Josie" Gallagher, one of the Arranmore's main sub-contractors, knows fellow islanders who have worked on tunnels as far afield as South Africa, Hong Kong and Guatemala. Laurence Gallagher, 50 years old with 34 years of tunnelling behind him, typifies the post-war breed of Arranmore men. He has a tunneller's broad back and huge forearms. His careers included the Edinburgh sewerage system, the original Jubilee Line, projects in New Guinea, Cairo and Kuwait, the Newcastle Metro transport system and the Channel Tunnel. There the Arranmore men worked ahead of a giant boring machine, creating the chambers into which it could fit and the ventilation shafts without which no work could be carried out.

Now Gallagher is a tunnel boss on the Jubilee Line extension, seven and three-quarter miles of tunnelling plus four crossings under the Thames. He is in charge of four tunnels linking the extensions, due to open in 1998, with the Northern Line. We stand in what will be the ticket hall of London Bridge station, engulfed in the scream of compressor drills as a winch hauls up a skip with another one-and-a-half tons of London "blue" clay from the tunnel face. Above us dangle the umbilical trappings of a modern city-sewerage and gas pipes, telephone, electricity and television cables-as we go down another 60 feet via three ladders, Gallagher with the ease of a monkey, myself slowly and fearfully. We are in a world of concrete-shored walls pierced by the twisted teeth of reinforcing bars, scaffolding, plank walkways, a laser beam laying an immobile red dot for the engineers, and miniature rail tracks for hauling earth and materials.

We make it to the tunnel face, 100 feet underground, and lean against what used to be the outer casing of the Northern Line. Here we meet Derek Conlon junior, the son of the general foreman, and Gallagher's boy Bryan. Plumes of blue smoke puff out from the compressor as they wield 14 pound "air spades" that cut into the dark clay like spoons scooping into a gateau. For every yard of the five-foot diameter preliminary tunnel, they have to move 20 tons of earth before the can attach cast-iron sections into connecting hoop of protective casing. Behind then clearing the mounds of earth into the bucket skip swinging from a gantry crane, is another Arranmore lad, Danny Boyle, and the only outsider in the gang, Derek Gallagher, from County Mayo. Derek Conlon senior says the Arranmore men are noted not only for their capacity for sustained hard work but also for meticulous time-keeping on their 12-hour shifts. It is an odd compliment, because Arranmore itself is one of the most timeless places in the world.

What is the secret of Arranmore? To find out, I flew to Londonderry, then drove across the Irish border into County Donegal. Buffeted by a fierce westerly gale, I corkscrewed round an endless series of hairpin bends amidst a barren landscape of rock and sparkling lakes before arriving at the ferry by the fish-processing sheds at Burtonport. The ferryboat eased out between deeply fissured outcrops of granite, sculpted smooth by wind and wave, before pushing out towards the five-mile-long island and its hilly backbone. Except for the south-east corner facing the mainland, where white-walled bungalows primped with TV satellite dishes speckle the landscape, the island is virtually treeless. The western side, exposed to the full wrath of Atlantic gales, consists of steep cliffs inhabited only by sea birds.

A bumpy, potholed road that winds westward between dry stone walls and straggling sheep wire fencing beside the crashing ocean is matched by the dilapidated condition of the vehicles on it. It is not unusual to see a 14-year old lad driving a 40-year old tractor without tax disc or number plate. Even the name of the place seems to be negotiable. Everyone calls it Arranmore - Árainn Mhór in Gaelic, meaning "the big divide"-but it is marked on maps as "Aran Island", a legacy of British rule that no one has got round to changing. Starting in the last century, its people used to go to Scotland to find summer farmwork. Men would walk from Burtonport to Londonderry, then take the boat across the Irish Sea. When the railway come in 1903, they were often joined by their families. "It was work or starve, as simple as that," says Patrick Bonner, 79, who taught on the island for 40 years. "Eighty or ninety per cent of the population would be working away."

In the 1920s and '30s, the Arranmore men in Scotland switched from farmwork to sinking shafts for coal pits and rock-tunnelling. "I remember the pay rates-£2 10s a week on the farm, £9 a week in the tunnels," says Bonner. "The big civil engineering companies like Carmichael, Taylor Woodrow, Laing, Balfour Beatty were household names to us. All the cemeteries hereabouts have headstones of someone who was killed in Scotland." Hector Maclean, a retired engineer who first came across the Arranmore men as tunnellers on 1950 hydroelectric schemes in the Highlands, says: "They were great workers. They came from the island in their suits and we said, 'Hold on, lads, we'll get you some proper working togs.' But when we came back, there they were, stuck into the job in their best suits."

Traditionally, the men only came home at Christmas, Easter and on August bank holiday, leading to a high proportion of the population having birthdays at the same times of year. These days, especially from Britain, they return fortnightly, laden with the latest consumer products, block-booking seats on aircraft and even hiring their own boats if they are too late for the ferry. Cars with personalised number plates have appeared on the island, and its wealth has for 30 years been the envy of other parts of Donegal. The drinking and socializing in the seven island pubs, when groups of men on £800 a week come home, are legendary. The licensing hours are elastic, to say the least. In a bar I was recruited to join a quiz team. The contest began at 12.30am and we did not leave the pub until nearly 4am. Official closing time in mainland Donegal is 11 pm, but the island has no police station and runs to its own clock. "A sergeant did come over a few years ago and said he wanted everyone to close by 2 am," said one pub licensee with a wink. "Fortunately we managed to talk him out of that."

The exodus from the island has accelerated since the collapse of the fishing industry. "I only work in England because the fishing here has been ruined by big trawlers sitting out at sea hoovering up all the fish," says Patrick O'Donnell in his typical island bungalow, sheltered from the prevailing westerly gales. "I first went fishing with my father, as all the boys did, when I was 14. Now none of the lads get to do it." Adds "Charlie-Dolly" Boyle, retired lighthouse attendant and former mechanic on the Arranmore lifeboat: "Only ten years ago there were 25 fishing boats providing about 100 jobs. Now the young men don't have any choice but to go away to work." "Charlie-Dolly" is distinguished from other relatives called Charlie Boyle by the tradition of adding his mother's first name. "One islander is known as 'Eddie-Mary-Anne'," explains postmistress Noreen Martin, who has returned to Arranmore with her three young children after years working in London. "You can understand why. There are nine Philip Boyles and two Patrick Boyles on the island, and all sorts of Gallaghers with the same first names. Luckily out postman knows everybody, so he can sort out which Mrs Boyle will have an aunt writing to her from Canada."

With the demise of fishing, tourism and building projects are trying to take up the slack. They include a £500,000 holiday village complex opened in July this year and experiment in mussel farming. "There's no poverty here now," says Tony "the Cope" (for "Co-Op") Gallagher, and ex-tunneller who runs the co-operative for the island's building trade. "Even the old people are well looked after, with free peat for their fires and a bus to a day centre." Tony's father lost most of his fingers in a gas explosion when sinking foundations for Chicago skyscrapers. So what sets Arranmore men apart? Laurence Gallagher believes it is the unity forged by growing up together on a small island. Almost everybody is somehow related, and until recently the children had to go to boarding school together on the mainland. "People think there are 26 counties in the Irish Republic," he says. "But there's another - Arranmore."

Thomas Costello, 20, represents the newer breed of "tunnel tiger". "I love this job," he says over a pint in a London pub at the end of his shift. "But it's more than that. It's the island culture. It's something to follow and look up to." "On my first contract I nearly didn't get off the boat at Burtonport - I'm a home boy at heart. Then on my first day, I was working on the surface when the cry came up, 'Send Costello down'. I had to climb down a ladder 90 feet to the pit bottom. I was quivering with fear, but then I met the boss Josie Gallagher and the other lads from home who worked the tunnel face. I stayed three months working non-stop, just to prove to myself I could do it. "When I went home, I could tell the younger lads what it was like. Now they all want to go tunnelling."

Readers Digest
September 1997