Ireland's energy transition demands a new calibre of engineering leadership and talent to secure its critical infrastructure for the future. The challenge is not just technical; it is about cultivating a culture of safety, innovation, and diverse perspectives across the sector.

This episode explores the pivotal role of engineers in making high-stakes decisions, transforming safety from a rule to a core value, and addressing the persistent gender imbalance in the industry. Learn how a varied background and holistic thinking are key to solving the complex problems of tomorrow, from power generation to the energy demands of artificial intelligence.

Joining us is Majella Henchion, Technical Capability Manager at ESB, a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of Engineers Ireland. Majella shares her three decades of experience, transitioning from managing iconic sites like Turlough Hill to leading the strategic recruitment of the next generation of engineers.
 

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
●    Overcoming professional imposter syndrome.
●    Managing high-risk power plant operations.
●    Making safety a deeply human value.
●    Why engineering needs more women.
●    Developing future holistic engineering talent.

GUEST DETAILS
Majella Henchion is the Technical Capability Manager at ESB, responsible for ensuring the utility possesses the personnel required to drive the energy transition. A Chartered Engineer and Fellow of Engineers Ireland, her career spans three decades in pivotal leadership roles. Her key achievements include managing the Turlough Hill pumped storage station and leading critical safety assurance programmes.
●    Website: https://www.esb.ie
●    Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/majellahenchion/?originalSubdomain=ie

QUOTES
"Imposter syndrome comes back every time you take on a new challenge, and what I began to realise was I liked that challenge". – Majella Henchion

"If you can put that trust in people, they will repay you double fold". – Majella Henchion

"We need our engineers to be more holistic in their thinking". – Majella Henchion

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, here is an AI transcription: 

Dusty Rhodes  0:01  
Right now on Amplified,

Majella Henchion  0:02  
I kind of want us to double down, produce a lot more high-quality electrical engineers, particularly for the energy industry, and if we're going into AI that is using so much energy, it's going to be engineers working probably with some research scientists who will solve those kinds of problems.

Dusty Rhodes  0:27  
Hi there, my name is Dusty Rhodes, and you're welcome to Amplified, the Engineers Ireland podcast. Managing some of Ireland's most critical infrastructure demands more than just technical skill. It can take nerves to manage our multi million euro power plants across the country, our guest today has huge experience in this area, and today is recruiting the next generation of engineers whose varied backgrounds are creating more effective holistic problem solvers. To share some stories and to take a peek at the future, it is a pleasure to welcome the Technical Capability manager at the ESB, Majella Henschion. Majella, thank you for joining us.

Majella Henchion  1:05  
Thank you.

Dusty Rhodes  1:10  
So, Majella, tell me, can you recall the exact moment that you realised engineering is for me?

Majella Henchion  1:18  
It's funny, if you ask me, when was the moment when I realised I was an engineer, that was about five years after I qualified, because I felt like a total fraud up to then.

Dusty Rhodes  1:26  
Go on, tell us what happened. What happened?

Majella Henchion  1:28  
So I was in the very lucky position in the 80s that my parents had decided they were sending all five of us to college. So when I was in leaving search, what I had to do was look at the CAO and work out what I wanted to do. There were limits. You had to stay in Dublin because they could not afford anything other than us living at home. So I started crossing things out. Okay, having gone and looked at a couple of things in hospitals and fainted, I crossed all of those out and a variety of other things. I ended up down at engineering and science, and in the 80's there was still very little industry that was science-oriented in Ireland. There was none of the pharma or the biotech, and all of that. So, I didn't want to be a secondary school teacher, so I didn't do science, and that left me with engineering. In some ways, I'd been kind of fighting the thing that my dad and two of my older siblings, my brothers, were both engineers, but I didn't really know much about what they did anyway. So, literally, I ruled everything else out. I was good at everything in school because I was a SWAT, but I liked maths and science, so that's how I ended up studying engineering.

Dusty Rhodes  2:33  
Just came to you naturally,

Majella Henchion  2:35  
I picked UCD because that was where the three older siblings had already gone, and at that stage, Dad had just started lecturing in Bolton Street, so I didn't want to go to DIT, not because there was anything wrong with it, but because no one with a surname like Henchion wants to go to the obvious place where you're related to one of the professors.

Dusty Rhodes  2:54  
I think it's really interesting, Majella, that you say for the first five years of your career you felt like a fraud. Why?

Majella Henchion  3:02  
Well, so I'm a mechanical engineer who really doesn't care how her car works, so long as it gets it from A to B, and who never really wants to pick up a spanner or take something apart, or what have you. And those are all the things that you were supposed to want to do if you're a mechanical engineer. So literally, for about five years after I qualified, I kept expecting somebody to tap me on the shoulder and say, "You're not a real engineer, and it kind of took me that long, I think, to realise that there's more than one way of being a mechanical engineer, and that I was actually very good at being a mechanical engineer, just in a different way.

Dusty Rhodes  3:40  
Tell me the story of the moment where you went, oops, I am an engineer.

Majella Henchion  3:45  
Well, actually, because of my uncertainty, and because I was always good academically, see, I sort of felt I had done well in college just because I was a good SWAT and good at maths and science, but I decided that I would apply for my Chartership with Engineers Ireland about five or six years out of college, so I had to write up my report, and they accepted that. So, even while I was still waiting for my interview, I kind of felt I've already been reviewed by at least one peer, and they think I'm good, but also, like, doing that process caused me to do a reflection as well, and I was thinking, gosh, they've let me be in charge of multi million euro plant here at two in the morning. It was down to me to decide what to do if anything went wrong. Now I can tell you, many a night I went in with my fingers and everything else crossed that nothing would go wrong and I wouldn't have to make the decision, but people had decided they could put that level of trust in me. So when I started reflecting, I realised, well, no way, I'm the only one who thinks I'm a fraud here, so and then I did get my Chartership, which is a review by your peers, saying that only are you a qualified engineer, but you're competent to work on your own and under your own initiative, so yes, my imposter syndrome was kind of...

Dusty Rhodes  4:58  
Done.

Majella Henchion  4:59  
Eliminated at that. Stage, but you know what, imposter syndrome comes back every time you take on a new challenge, and what I began to realise was I liked that challenge of saying, I wonder, can I do it, so I kept on taking on new things to do, and each time, while you feel that little, I wonder, can I do it, you kind of know I've done it before in totally different things, because I've always managed to do it eventually, so I will now. So that's probably how I've had such a varied career, because I kind of swung almost from one extreme to the other of saying, 'Sure, I can do anything if I put my mind to it.

Dusty Rhodes  5:33  
Well, it's true, though, isn't it? Like, you know, you mentioned that you were in charge of multi million euro plants earlier in your career, and I'm thinking this is with the ESB and some of the biggest power plants they had around them. Tell me, where you worked and what you were doing from an engineering point of view.

Majella Henchion  5:48  
I remember once being in a college, telling them about all the power stations I'd worked in, and there was a colleague with me, and I could see him getting really anxious because he was from Ahada Station, and every station I'd mentioned, other than Ahada, we'd either shut down or sold, so luckily for him, I was able to talk about quite a few other ones. So Ahada Station was the one where I was first made what they used to call shift engineers, now shift manager, and where I would have been responsible for the operation of the plant. Now, obviously, during the day shift, there were lots of other people around, but during the night shift, you would find yourself there with a team of competent individuals, but they had no knowledge of the electrical side of things, and it was down to you to make the decisions about whether plant continued to run and how to fix anything that went wrong, or you'd limited ability to fix things, so you didn't have a big maintenance crew there, but whether you could continue to run or should shut it down. And, interestingly, as a mechanical engineer, the best fun you had in power stations was when they were actually shut down and you were doing all the maintenance. So, I would have worked in almost all of our Midland Pete stations when we had them. I worked on a project in Tarbridge before we sold that back in the noughties. I was working on that back in the 90s. It was one of my first projects, and it was great experience, because I was working actually on as much of the commercial as the engineering. So, where commercial and engineering meet is where you get contractors to do what you need done. I've worked in Pool Bag and North Wall, but the coolest job I've ever had, and it's a good few years back now. I was plant manager of Turkle Hill and Liffey stations, so that's the pump storage station in Wicklow, plus the Liffey stations. It's interesting when you're in that position, obviously your first responsibility isn't making electricity at all. First responsibility is the safety of everybody on your site, and then actually when it's Turkle Hill and Liffey stations, your next responsibility is a water supply for Dublin City, because the water works for a huge proportion of Dublin are taken out of Pulibuka Reservoir and out of Leekslip Reservoir, and we control the flow of water to those, and then your third responsibility is not to flood things, so luckily Pula Vuca is a huge reservoir. Looking at the weather forecast takes a whole new meaning. I can tell you when you're actually looking at that, or when it's snowed and you're trying to make sure that there's room for the melting snowfall to fall in, and things like that. And then the fourth priority was making electricity, and there was so much interesting stuff about it, and just before I'm always very quick to say it was my predecessor who broke the plant, but in fairness to him, it was the end of life. We were almost 40 years generating when one of the generators had a failure on it, and due to the nature of that failure, we realised we needed to do major refurbishment works. So Turley Hill had a very small number of engineers, so myself, together with one of the guys who worked for me, we scoped out the full amount of work that we needed to do to invest in the station, refurbish it, and make sure it could go for another 3040 years. I mean, getting the chance to do that, and to not just fix the generator, but look up now, what's all the other things? Well, that's shut down. What else should we do? How can we, and how do we do it, and what's the logistics of it? So, yes, that was a great place. Had the highest office in the land, because not many people are higher up than the Wicklow gap, and, and I was responsible, like my boss wasn't on site. I would have a conversation with him a couple of times a week, but that was it. It was my responsibility

Dusty Rhodes  9:21  
just to put a picture into my head. Can you give me an example or a story of something that happened when at 3am somebody's tapping you on the shoulder in Turlock Hill, going, "Majella, we have a problem".

Majella Henchion  9:34  
Well, luckily, there weren't too many 3am calls. Okay, so one day I came in, my office was on the surface, but I would frequently go down, sort of first thing into the cavern to chat with the guys who were there 24/7 partly just to be seen to show an interest in them before they headed off, or as they were coming in, and but also just to hear how things went, and one of the shift managers said. Me, we seem to be using more power pumping at night than normal. The generator seems to be drawing a higher load, so we started looking into it. Said, look, that's just not right. So we took more formal measurements, and he was absolutely right. We were using, you know, a significant percentage more, and not twice or anything like that, not something that you'd really notice, but the, you know, he had noticed that the generator, when it was pumping, was taking in more power than it should. So we ended up shutting down the unit to get somebody to come in and have a look at it, one of our specialists from head office. And me, being me, I decided to crawl into the generator with them. It's always kind of weird getting in when you know you've actually just got a valve from a big column of 30 metres of water coming down on top of you, but we got in, so this is my first time inside a hydro unit, and I saw the damage to the turbine, and I'm thinking, oh my god, I'm going to have two broken units, I've only got four here, what am I going to do, because there was lots of damage on the turbine, but actually talking with my turbine specialist, he said, Majella, we're lucky it's even all the way round, it hasn't been causing any imbalance in the rotation, we'll put it back into service and we just check it every six months to see if it's getting worse, and I said that's fine, but I've got to find out what caused this. It could still be in there, because Turtle Kill is a closed system. You drop the water down and you send it back up. So we shut down the whole station, so that we could get into the other bits for a day. We crawled around, we found what looked like some marbles, and luckily one of the lads took a look and said, I think that's copper, and we went back to the drawings, and there's only one thing in the whole station that has copper in it, these guides on basically the plug in the upper reservoir. So we worked out that one of those had fallen off and gone through the machine. So now I've got to decide. This is about February.

Dusty Rhodes  11:59  
Wow,

Majella Henchion  11:59  
the weather on the upper reservoir was horrendous and very unpredictable.

Dusty Rhodes  12:04  
Yeah,

Majella Henchion  12:05  
believe it or not, to pull the plug out, so the plug spends most of its time just hanging over the hole held up there. Okay, to pull it out takes about three days to lift it up, just due to the nature of the whole mechanical stuff, and then it was going to take us at least a day to repair and another three days to put it down, and the idea that I was going to get a clear week in winter up at the upper reservoir was actually very low,

Dusty Rhodes  12:31  
yeah,

Majella Henchion  12:31  
but if that plug didn't work and we sprung a major leak, you're at risk of flooding the entire cabin below, okay, because everything is below the level, all right. So I'm there. I had to basically do a risk assessment to balance these things out. And Turk Hill is the backup for Dublin. If we lose power in Dublin, you need Turk Hill to restart it. So it's not just a case of me saying, "Oh, sure, look, if it takes two or three weeks, it takes two or three weeks. It means you're leaving Dublin at risk in that kind of period, so I did a risk assessment, and I decided what we were going to do is we're going to run until May when the days would be longer and the weather is much more settled, and that we could probably manage better, and there'd also be a little bit more wind and things like that more reliably on the system, so that you could do without Turklik Hill better, but more importantly, we'd make it as short a time as possible. So I rang my boss and told him this is what I was doing, and he said, "Well, look, that's what you think, Majella, that's fine. And so we ran from February until May with this risk that if we tried to close the thing, that it mightn't close properly. We never had to try and close it, and we got about 20 minutes of rain only during the one week it took us to shut down, drain the whole of the upper reservoir, and fix the thing, and yes, it was exactly what we thought had come off.

Dusty Rhodes  13:56  
Yeah,

Majella Henchion  13:57  
we had the spare part made in time, and everything, you know, so it all worked out really well, and myself and my very young kids at the time, and my husband got to be amongst less than probably 200 people who have stood on the bottom of the reservoir in Turtle Kill because it was empty, and I brought them up at the weekend to see it. My husband's a mechanical engineer, so he loves getting to see all of that as well, you know. There you go, but it's a memory for the kids, and actually on my desk here I have a photograph of the five of us taken that day, not in the reservoir, but on the banks of it. So, yeah, but those are the kinds of things that you know people don't even realise that those are the kinds of decisions that have to be made, and it's a lot of different risks you're balancing, and you use your engineering knowledge and experience to make your mind up. It

Dusty Rhodes  14:45  
sounds like you really enjoyed the hands-on engineering work. So, why go from that then into management?

Majella Henchion  14:52  
So, it was about 2003 that I went into a full line management role, and that was in a power station in Alexandria. Key in town, before that I'd been working mostly in engineering, and then from there I went to Turley Hill, and one of the things I discovered in my time, that was about seven or eight years of my life, was that I loved helping other people be really good at what they could be good at. Okay, so I actually got more of a kick out of having a graduate engineer come and work for me and seeing them get really better and better, or finding like, and there's plenty of awkward individuals in the world, okay, and we have our fair share in some of our parents, we know

Dusty Rhodes  15:37  
many

Majella Henchion  15:38  
finding someone who was clearly unhappy and disgruntled, and making some of the other people around them unhappy and disgruntled, and helping them find something that they could do in a way they could contribute. Okay, paying attention and listening, and almost helping some of them, in spite of themselves, to be nice for to be around, and to be better at their job, so I suppose when I realised that I realised that I needed to go higher in the organisation to be able to have a bigger impact on more people, and look part of it as well, like while I love the jar of an turret of hill, it can be a bit lonely when you are the person at the top, and particularly my boss actually had two different managers during my period there, but because they trusted me and realised I was very good at the job, that allowed them to leave me more alone than if I wasn't particularly good, which then can be a bit isolating. So, like, it was a very demanding job, so part of me kind of needed a bit of a change anyway, and part of me wanted that chance to have a bigger impact, so I moved to head office. They were looking for somebody to cover for someone who was going on a project, so I said, "Yes, I'd do that. And then, while I was doing that, they needed a new safety manager for the generation business. I didn't volunteer for it, because the last guy had been heavy into the safety engineering, but his boss came to me and said, "We're really disappointed you haven't applied, and I explained, "Look, I didn't want to be like him. I said, "Look, if you want me to do the job, what I want to do is work on behavioural safety, on how people approach safety, on attitudes, and things like that, and that was what he wanted. So, I mean, so that was perfect for me.

Dusty Rhodes  17:20  
Let me ask you about safety, because everybody in engineering talks about safety, and you know, kind of engineering is.. I've always said somebody said the other day, engineering is all about failure, or thinking about how things can go wrong, and then fixing them. So, safety is a massive part of it, like, you know?

Majella Henchion  17:33  
Yes.

Dusty Rhodes  17:33  
But sometimes it doesn't feel like safety is a value. Do you know it's like something that you have to do, and you have to take it into account. I mean, in your own experience, what's the best way to make safety feel like a value rather than a rule?

Majella Henchion  17:48  
For a period, we did say that safety was a value at ESV. What we actually say now is that it's intrinsic to everything we do.

Dusty Rhodes  17:55  
Yeah.

Majella Henchion  17:56  
Okay, so it's no more of a value than breathing air, it has to be in everything, but the value that makes you really do safety properly, rather than covering your backside safety. Okay, and that's as polite as I could put it, is caring. Okay, so when I went up to Turtle Kill, one of the things that I remember was that at the time we had a fire response situation, which actually first of all got people to gather in the cavern before evacuating, and I'm saying that's valuable minutes that you're losing.

Dusty Rhodes  18:31  
Yeah.

Majella Henchion  18:31  
But then we also had some people who used to volunteer that they would go back in with the fire brigade to help find people. Okay, so I had to sit myself down and say, if I ever have to make that awful call, could I ever make the call saying I'm sorry so and so, your son or your daughter has died, and it's because I told them to gather here and therefore they were delayed coming out, or I sent them back in, and they didn't come out, and I decided I couldn't do either of those things, so I made the decision to move our evacuation point up to the surface, and that meant that every time an alarm went off accidentally, which during the refurbishment, works started at first was quite frequent. Yeah, you'd lose over half an hour of work from everyone while they would evacuate to the surface. We'd do our head count and we'd go back down, but what if it wasn't, you know, an accidental thing that mattered to me. And actually, when I talked with the fire brigade, they didn't want to have to have our people with them, no matter how well trained they were, because that was more people for them to take care of. Okay, so what I actually did was, in the refurbishment, I got a redesign done on the main stairwell, which allowed our people to safely go right down to the bottom of the stair. Farewell with the fire brigade and give them information from there rather than from the surface, but not to actually go out into the danger areas. So, if you are being caring and if you're thinking about the what ifs, which engineering is all about.

Dusty Rhodes  20:15  
Yeah.

Majella Henchion  20:16  
You have to do that balancing up, and I just felt that there was no way I could ever go and tell somebody that their husband, their father, their son, and in almost every case it was going to be a man had lost their life.

Dusty Rhodes  20:31  
Yeah.

Majella Henchion  20:31  
Because they didn't get out and stay out.

Dusty Rhodes  20:36  
You were thinking all this in the back of your head, and you're developing the safety assurance framework, which I mean, it's fantastic in the way you say it and thinking, but when you start saying this to other people in an organisation, they go, "I gotta have enough to be thinking about without adding all of this stuff on, right? So, I'm sure there was a certain amount of resistance, but did you meet much resistance, and how is it now?

Majella Henchion  20:56  
So, look, to be honest, safety is a jury that ESP has been on for a long, long time, so I started in 1990 and I remember the first time I went to a power station. It was actually myself and another couple of graduates. We were sent down to find all the bits of plant we'd been learning about in the classroom. Okay, and we were decked out in all the PPE because we'd been told we had to wear all this protective equipment, and then we're wandering around the plant, looking for things, and we kept bumping into engineers who were in sandals, who were in their day clothes, and all that kind of thing, because it was kind of thought the PPE was really only necessary for the lads who were doing maintenance work, and it wasn't as good as the PPE we have now, if you go into any ESB power station now, and walk into the offices, you'll find the plant manager in his or her PPE sitting there in case they have to go out onto the plant. No one would consider going out without it. That's part of the journey we've been on. My predecessor spent 17 years as the manager for safety, and a good few years before that as a safety engineer, and they were engineering out as much of the intrinsic risk as you could in the plant, whether it was introducing ways of letting people wear harnesses or reducing the need for them to actually climb at a height, and all of that kind of thing, lots of stuff. So, when I got there, it was now all about people's attitudes, and I suppose one of the reasons that I took on that role was because what I had discovered in my few years working with guys was if you allowed them tell you what they thought was unsafe and you took their word at it didn't think, oh, this guy's just looking for some extra money or whatever, and you acted on their advice. I have a particular case when I was in North Wall, we were on what was called a weekend shutdown, so we had two days in which to do whole load of maintenance and needed to get the thing back on the bars, and one of the guys comes to me and he says we shouldn't be doing that from a ladder, we should be doing it from a scaffold, and I said, okay, you're a scaffolder, how long would it take you to put up a scaffold, and he said, well, no, if we do it from a scaffold now, it's going to take an extra two days, and I said, fine, off you go, back down you go, start getting the scaffold up, tell the lads to get off the ladders, I'll ring the guys in head office and let them know we're going to be two days late back, and he just went, oh, because he couldn't believe that I hadn't questioned him, that I hadn't come down to inspect it myself, and to see whether or not I could argue him out of his point of view for the next three four years that I was in that station. I don't know how many times this guy, and he was a real banger at the table union guy. Okay, he came to me so often with suggestions about how we could do things more safely, but also faster and better. Actually, by the end of that extra long weekend, which he managed to make, not take two extra days, but only one. He came back to me, said, 'I've actually worked out a way we can do it quicker next time and safe. So, if you can put that trust in people, they will repay you double fold. So, one of the things I said is, when I took on the job, said, 'I'm not going to audit any power station anymore. My predecessor had to order them. I'm not auditing them. I'm not going to go and say to them I'm from head office, I'm here to help, and give them a list of 20 or 30 things they have to do. I will go and visit them, I'll have conversations with them, I may even suggest they think of doing things, but I'm not going to put them on a list that they're going to be hungover in the future, and as a result, people invited me down to help them have an extra voice, come up with, have a discussion about it, and they knew as well that because I'd been them for enough years, you know, I understood that it wasn't just one thing that was on their agenda, they hid everything else, and that they did want it to be safety first, so that's the big thing. If you lead by example when it comes to safety, and that means never being caught, not holding the handrail, never been caught without your PPE. Speaking up when you see somebody coming out without their safety glasses on, you say, 'Hey, look, I'll wait for you, just go back and get your safety glasses, having your own on. Then people. Don't see it as paperwork to cover the boss's ass, they see it as maybe they're really interested in my own safety.

Dusty Rhodes  25:06  
Majella, can I turn to more of the stuff that you're doing today? And I think you have a fondness or lightning of promoting engineering as a career choice for women.

Majella Henchion  25:16  
Yeah.

Dusty Rhodes  25:16  
My question is, why is there still a need to do that this day and age.

Majella Henchion  25:20  
Okay, well, so first of all, because the last census, only I think it's 12 or 13% of the people who identify themselves as engineers were women, so clearly we haven't gotten to anything like the 50:50 parity that is there in the world. Okay, so that's in Ireland, there are some countries where it's better, there's very few countries where it's worse, so that's one. The second, if you go into the universities, you will see it's better, but it's never more than about 25% Okay, and in some areas, particularly electrical engineering, which is a big one for the ESP, it's way lower than that. Okay, so we need.. so if you think that engineers are solving a lot of the problems of the world, some of them we've created, but our job is to try and solve the problems and try not to have the unintended consequences of previous solvings. The more types of people and the more types of background and understanding and worldviews you have trying to solve a problem, the better the solution. So that's why we need women in the profession, but one of the reasons it's so difficult is because from the moment you're put in a pink blanket or a blue blanket, society is gendering us all the way, so supposedly by the age of six girls are already thinking that they're no good at maths and that maths and science are for boys almost as soon as they start socialising, that's being gendered, so, so that's why we have to keep fighting for women in a male profession. Now, by the way, accounting and medicine have totally overcome those things. Okay, so what we've got to do is we've got to find a way, and we've got to look up why those have overcome it, and why engineering hasn't yet.

Dusty Rhodes  27:06  
Why do you think then that accounting in medicine is getting a better gender balance in those careers, and engineering isn't?

Majella Henchion  27:12  
So, when it comes to accounting, I think once the formal education of girls and the idea that girls and women might need to be financially independent and work for themselves. I think accountancy became a very practical profession. It was in an office, it was clean and tidy. I suspect I've no grounds on that, except my own understanding of the world.

Dusty Rhodes  27:36  
Okay, that's all I'm asking. Yeah.

Majella Henchion  27:36  
I think when it comes to medicine, a lot of medical professions were always heavily female, but I'm talking about becoming a doctor. Women who were good at maths and science, like me, and who didn't faint at the sight of blood, like I'm fine in a crisis. It's just when I see it there on a.. anyway, women are rare to be nurturers, whether we like it or not. And doctoring is a caring profession, so a lot of the time when I'm talking about engineering, I try and actually talk about how engineering is a caring profession, how it provides for people. So you might not know it, but supposedly the biggest single thing to extend the life expectancy of humanity was an engineering thing, which is clean running water.

Dusty Rhodes  28:21  
Yes, it's one of the basics, that and air.

Majella Henchion  28:23  
So, if you look at the world as a whole, and how the age that we're expected to live to has come up, clean water is what did it. It's why, you know, okay, we've had COVID, but we haven't had regular cholera and other epidemics, because we actually have clean water for people, and you know, in the third world, what's the first thing they look to do is to give them clean water. Okay, so that's engineering as a caring profession. If you then add in all the things that we rely on electricity for, how much smaller the world is because of good roads, good infrastructure, all of that kind of thing. You begin to realise that you know engineering is a caring profession, and then what you see is lots of girls going into biomedical and chemical and process, which is pharma, because they see those, so it's about getting them to realise it's not just the ones that are only one step removed from the patient, it's all of them that are really important to quality of life.

Dusty Rhodes  29:26  
In a lot of those other careers, you do see how more gender balance, if you like, within a team absolutely adds to it. So, like in your experience, how does gender balance specifically enhance the makeup of engineering teams?

Majella Henchion  29:39  
So, I've spent most of my career being the only woman on the team, okay, and trying not to have to behave like a man to get hurt, okay, and I think I've managed that, so one of the things I was very good at was getting to know people and sort of having relationships with people before I desperately needed them. And so I used to regularly be asked at interview, tell us about a time there was a confrontation and how you dealt with it, and I'm sitting there thinking, well, I had built a relationship so that the guys who were normally confrontational with everybody else would do things for me.

Dusty Rhodes  30:13  
Yeah.

Majella Henchion  30:13  
And that's actually one of the differences, these are broad generalisations, but in general women are much more likely to be prone to building consensus rather than saying bum bum bum, here's the answer. Okay, again, due to the whole nurturing and everything that we're brought up to be, women are more likely, even as engineers, to develop empathy faster and quicker, and therefore to be able to think more about the end customer, about the person that we're demanding to do something, and whether or not that's feasible for them to do. Yeah, so now you have to have a balance, so you have to have the here's the right thing to do, here's the financially correct thing, and that's what you need. And then, like, I mean, look, one of the other things that's great now is the fact that we have so many people who are raised in very different cultures, so it's not just about male and female, it's about different points of view, but so many of our systems are designed to promote people like us, and since us is generally male in engineering, that makes it more of a self-fulfilling thing, we are tended towards picking people like ourselves. It's just the way tribalism and everything comes about.

Dusty Rhodes  31:26  
You do an awful lot of work with schools. Have you ever had a case where you've spoken to somebody in transition year who's kind of went, 'Actually, I think I do want to be an engineer. Have you had that experience?

Majella Henchion  31:39  
Yes, I have now haven't been in schools as much lately, but one of the things I would do was I would always try, when arranging the visit, to get to see the whole year group, not to be just brought to the honours maths class or the physics class, and one of the reasons, particularly in girls' schools, for that was it wasn't that I expected to convert the whole year group, but what I wanted was that when Mary Ellen or Susan or whoever sort of thought, God, that sounds interesting, that when they'd say to their friends afterwards, I was thinking maybe I should consider engineering, they'd be able to say that sounds just like you, yeah, you'd be really good at that, rather than them saying you, what you know, because our peers and our parents, as well as our teachers and our guidance teachers, have a huge impact on what we do. So, yes, that was the thing, you talk to the whole group,

Dusty Rhodes  32:35  
Yeah.

Majella Henchion  32:35  
And I would talk about as many different engineers as I could. When I do a slideshow. I don't put any words up. I just show pictures of engineers and engineering problems, and I do remember in one school in particular being asked that question. So, I was explaining how you'd know you were an engineer about these curiosities and things of that, and she said, 'So, when did you know you were an engineer? It was the first time somebody asked me that, and that's when my answer that I gave you earlier came out, probably about five years after I qualified, but that's the other thing that I've often said to young people who are thinking about it, is look, engineering isn't an easy degree, but if you love maths and physics and you're curious about how things work and you like problem solving, you will be able for it, and you will find it enjoyable. At the end of an engineering degree, you can choose to do something else. So, actually, a college friend of mine, Neve Shaw, decided at the end of her engineering degree to go and do her PhD in science, and she's an engineering advocate, a science advocate, and she works in communications and everything like that now. Okay, but it's very difficult if you get to the end of any other degree to turn around and say, but now I'd like to be an engineer, and, like, I don't know what the number is now, but at one point almost everyone who ran a Fortune 500 company was an engineer by their degree. Arson Venger is an engineer, for God's sake, like, and so is Rowan Atkinson. So it's amazing how many people have started off with engineering degrees and gone totally different places, so it's not a burden to carry, you know.

Dusty Rhodes  34:08  
Yeah, it's a terrific basis, and literally is a password around the world, you know. And I often said that to my nieces and nephews, I say, if you want to travel, either become a barman or an engineer.

Majella Henchion  34:20  
If you're an engineer, you can always.

Dusty Rhodes  34:24  
Thinking of, you know, kind of the future and people coming into the business and stuff like that, and young engineers. What do you think is the most urgent skill that you know our engineering sector in Ireland needs to develop right now?

Majella Henchion  34:38  
So, a lot of people would say, oh, AI, they have to be able to work with AI, or they have to go renewables. I actually think what we need is more really, really solid foundational engineers, because I work with so many engineers who are really good at their primary degree, and they have picked up everything else. Along the way, I could bluff you into thinking I was a civil engineer, an electrical engineer, or a control engineer if I really wanted to, because of all I've picked up over the years. I'm not great with AI, but more because I just haven't had much need to do it, but I have colleagues who, you know, are 1015, and more years qualified, who are doing brilliant things with AI, but the thing is they understand the fundamental engineering underneath it. So, one of the things is they're really unlikely to be caught out by giving them an answer that's not right, because they actually understand the fundamentals. But we need our engineers to be more holistic in their thinking, and I'm not sure whether that's something we should try and do in college or whether it's down to employers to develop that, because there's so much being crammed into the college course already, but there's very few people who can solve any problem now on their own, so what you need is to be well able to interact and communicate with other engineers, with the accountants, with the economists, with the doctors, with whoever it is in your profession that you need to interact with. Dare I say it, even the architects. Okay, my civil engineering rather than occasionally can be a bit tired on not an ESP. I'm thinking more of my dad, God rest him. So that's actually the big piece, is that ability to understand the whole problem and understand people better. Used to call them soft skills, I think they call them transversal skills now, because the one thing you could say is they may be soft, but they're not easy, and those skills, that ability to communicate with people where they're at, but also then to work with a whole load of different disciplines, but that comes from being good at what you do yourself and not being unsure of yourself. So I kind of want us to double down, produce a lot more high-quality electrical engineers, particularly for the energy industry. It's really essential, and also like for the IT industry, can data be stored more efficiently and effectively? Can it use less electricity? That's going to actually be engineers, and if we're going into AI, that is using so much energy, it's going to be engineers working probably with some research scientists who will solve those kinds of problems, but they need to be good engineers first.

Dusty Rhodes  37:22  
Let me ramp up our chat today by asking about Engineers Ireland, because you're quite involved.

Majella Henchion  37:28  
Yep.

Dusty Rhodes  37:28  
Why on an Engineers Ireland podcast? But I mean, what do you get out of being an active member?

Majella Henchion  37:37  
So I suppose I'm involved because I do actually care passionately about solving the problems of the world, and I believe that engineers can do that, and anything that will help support engineers to do that is good. I'm also involved because the profession has given me so much I want to help give back. Call it a bus man's holiday, whatever, but it can be really interesting learning about what others in engineering are doing not always because I need to know that stuff, but just because it's interesting, but also there's bits of it that have just been really beneficial to my job. So, at the moment, I'm responsible for the hiring of all the graduate engineers and related professionals and all the interns into ESB, so that means I hire about 80 interns a year, and about 50 to 70 engineers, quality surveyors, and that a year from the various colleges around, and many of the people I'm hiring are maybe studying a master's here, but have studied abroad. So I'm on a board in Engineers Ireland, which is called the Membership and Qualifications Board, and what they do is they assess all the non-standardly educated people's qualifications to see whether they're appropriate to be recognised as an engineer in Ireland, and what routes they can have to professionalising themselves in Ireland, and things like that. That's been of immense benefit to me in both hiring people who aren't educated in Ireland, but also in working on the development of a huge proportion of the ESB's engineers, because we've about 65 different nationalities working in ESB, because engineers and IT professionals are in such short supply that we are having to bring them in on critical skills visas to work for us. I would love to see twice as many engineering places in Ireland, and lots of people studying electrical engineering, so that we weren't having to go abroad, but those engineers are bringing lots and lots of great things to us, and through my involvement with Engineers Ireland, I know more about how I can help them to fulfil their ambitions and ESB's ambitions, and that's just one of the many things. This also, like, just, you know, I meet so many people that I just enjoy conversing with, and we have shorthand because we have similar backgrounds, you know. So, like, one of the most awkward things I ever had to do was start being a mum outside the school gate after spending all my career. Early to that first point, working with men, I didn't really know how you chatted with women, because I hadn't done it much in a long time, you know. So I can do it, okay? And thank God there were babies and things like that to be talking about, but you know all that difference, it's just great. So again, I can have empathy for people because I have been the minority who's there. You get to meet an awful lot of people, and you always learn something, and you're giving back at the same time. So, win, win, win.

Dusty Rhodes  40:28  
Majella, it's been an absolute joy chatting with you today. If you'd like to learn more about Majella's work and the latest technical initiatives at ESB, you can check out the links in the description area of our podcast. But for now, Majella Henchion, thank you so much for joining us.

Majella Henchion  40:42  
Thank you, nice chatting to you.

Dusty Rhodes  40:44  
We hope you enjoyed our conversation today. If you do know another engineer who's interested in technical leadership and the future of energy, please share this podcast with them. They can find us very simply by searching for Engineers Ireland wherever they listen to podcasts. This episode is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. For advanced episodes, more information on diversity in engineering, or professional development, you can find a wealth of resources on the website at engineers ireland.ie Until next time, for myself, Dusty Rhodes. Thank you for listening.