Inside the Plant

The Ecocem (cement manufacturing) plant that is, on the south Dublin docks. Ecocem Ireland is an independent, specialist producer of GGBS (Ground Granulated Blastfurnace Slag) cement, which is 'upcycled' from industrial waste.

I had met one of the managers, Richard, while taking photographs nearby on the quayside a few months previously. He told me that if I wanted a good view of the docks he'd bring me up onto the huge silo that towers over the works. So eventually I called him and we made the appointment. I brought my filmmaking partner, Fiachra. When we pulled up outside the gates, I spotted this guy across the road, sitting on the edge of a wall, among the bright weeds behind a mountain of scrap metal, fishing. That's what I love about the docks, the edges of wholly different worlds adjacent but completely apart.

Richard was brilliant, very easygoing and informative. He had work to finish before he could talk to us so he gave us hard hats and allowed us shoot film and take photographs inside the main plant where a gigantic metal drum (the edge of which is visible in the lower foreground) mixes and grinds down the slag with the help of 250 tons of steel ball bearings.

After a little while Richard asked if we wanted to climb up onto the silo so we followed him out onto the roof of the plant. Then I saw the means by which we'd have to clamber up a further 60 feet or so, on exterior steel ladders. Funny. Climbing 700 feet up Skellig Michael wasn't too much of a problem, but I was a bit daunted by the sheerness of this (though coming down was slightly easier).

But once you got over the vertigo, the views were marvelous, as Richard had promised, a lovely eyrie over the industrial docklands.