James Power(1763–1817)

James Power was born at Dunkitt in County Kilkenny in 1763, into the small-farming remnant of the Wexford Powers, a Catholic Old-English Anglo-Norman family whose estates had been parcelled out under the Cromwellian and Williamite confiscations of the seventeenth century. The family had kept the surname, the Catholic faith, and very little else. He came up to Dublin in his early twenties, took the licence of the small inn at the corner of Thomas Street and John's Lane on the south-west edge of the medieval city in his early twenties, married Ellen Walsh in 1788, and learned behind the counter the one trade a Catholic of his class could legally practise to its full extent in the Dublin of the late Penal Laws: the sale of drink to other Catholics.

In January 1791 the Irish parliament, half-reformed and short of revenue, cut the pot-still duty on small distillers to the lowest rate in twenty years (one shilling and threepence on the gallon, against the London retail rate of eight shillings the gallon). Power, then in his twenty-eighth year, calculated the margin and committed his savings to the project. He set up the small pot-still in a backyard shed behind the John's Lane inn in the autumn of 1791, registered the small private distillery as James Power and Son, and began distilling whiskey on his own account for sale through the bar of the inn. The combination, unusual at the period, of producer and retailer under the same roof gave him the working capital structure and the direct retail customer base on which the next forty years of expansion rested.

His son John Power Junior (1771 to 1855) took over the active management of the distillery in his father's last years, was created the first Baronet of Edermine in 1841, served as Lord Mayor of Dublin 1851 to 1852, expanded the distillery operation through the 1820s and 1830s into the substantial John's Lane site that ran the length of the southern side of the lane (the Powers stables, malt-houses, pot-still still-house, cooperage and bonded warehouse), and brought the operation by the mid-nineteenth century to a production scale of over two million imperial gallons of pure spirit per year. James Power died at Dublin in 1817 in his fifty-fourth year and was buried in the family vault at St Catherine's parish, Thomas Street, the parish of the original inn.

By 1880 the John's Lane distillery, under the third generation of the Power family (John William Power, who became Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1865), was the largest distillery in the world by single-site output, producing four million gallons of pure spirit per year. The Powers Three Swallows trademark was registered in 1888; the brand was, by the assessment of the Edinburgh and London spirits journals of the 1890s, the most consistently respected Irish single-distillery brand and the leading exporter of Irish whiskey to the British, American and Australian markets. Power's Whiskey merged with Jameson and Cork Distilleries in 1966 to form Irish Distillers, the long-consolidated Irish whiskey company that produced the entire Irish whiskey export through the late twentieth century, and which is now part of Pernod Ricard. The original John's Lane pot-still closed in 1974 and operations moved to the new Midleton distillery in County Cork, where Powers Three Swallows continues to be produced under the same name on the same brand. The Power name in modern Irish industry carries the weight of the small Thomas Street pot-still of the autumn of 1791.