In the cut-throat modern world of shipping, who much cares about the closure of a small and ageing European shipyard that has not completed a ship since 2003, and that has struggled to find a viable niche since?
Surely all attention should be on recent moves to create shipbuilding behemoths in South Korea and China through the shotgun marriages of their biggest players, and the ongoing battle of the giants that is likely to ensue?
But when that relatively insignificant yard built one of the world’s most infamous vessels, it seems everyone is eager to hear the story. Regardless of scale, the tale has deep resonance with very real commercial issues.
Belfast shipyard Harland and Wolff was put into administration this week with the loss of 123 full-time jobs, marking a sorry end to a 158-year history of the yard that built the Titanic.
Harland and Wolff’s fate over the last 50 years has been a long-term decline punctuated by occasional moments of hope. Ultimately, there may yet be another resurrection with two bidders reportedly waiting to move if the yard’s nearly £40m ($48.5m) legacy pension scheme deficit is cleared.
The yard’s symbolism is more than just as the builder of the Titanic, at the time of its launch the world’s biggest ship that sank in the north Atlantic on its maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.
At its peak, Harland and Wolff was Northern Ireland’s biggest employer with more than 35,000 workers. Its two gantry cranes, Samson and Goliath, still dominate the city’s skyline and today are talked of locally as an emotional anchor to the city’s industrial heritage.
Varied history
The yard was first bailed out by the UK government in 1966 and fully nationalised in 1975 as shipbuilding moved east. In 1989, it was privatised with the sale to a management and employee consortium backed by Norwegian industrialist Fred Olsen.
Over the last 30 years, the yard repeatedly tried to diversify into new areas of business; naval shipbuilding, shiprepair, oil rig repair, and most recently the construction of wind turbines and offshore windfarm infrastructure.
Yet not even the boom in renewables has provided enough work to create a stable business, despite UK government support estimated to have totalled £1bn over the last three decades.
The final nail in Harland and Wolff’s coffin was the bankruptcy earlier this year of its owner, Dolphin Drilling, due to the long-term decline in the offshore market. Dolphin, which changed its name from Fred Olsen Energy, had put the yard up for sale late last year. It folded in June when it could not negotiate a debt restructuring with its creditors.
Harland and Wolff’s collapse has focused attention on commercial and government failures over many years. As workers this week continued a sit-in at the yard, politicians on the right and left weighed in with their support for the yard's workers and criticism of the UK government.
On the left, opposition chancellor John McDonnell urged the Conservative government, led by new Prime Minister Boris Johnson, to commit new naval orders to the yard.
More fundamental criticism lays in the failure of the UK to follow the path taken in France, Germany, Italy and Finland, where targeted subsidies have supported the reinvention of the shipbuilding industry
And on the right, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Arlene Foster, also voiced frustration. Complaints from the DUP are particularly heartfelt, bearing in mind Harland and Wolff’s reputation as a bastion of the protestant community.
Politically potent
Yet they are also politically potent, since the DUP has already won around £1bn in extra funding for Northern Ireland by committing to support the minority Conservative government in parliament. In the run up to a possible UK general election, there is clear pressure for more money.
More fundamental criticism lies in the failure of the UK to follow the path taken in France, Germany, Italy and Finland, where targeted subsidies have supported the reinvention of the shipbuilding industry over the last two decades to lead the world in cruiseship construction.
One of the potential bidders for Harland and Wolff is MJM Marine, a cruise and yacht refit specialist based in Newry, Northern Ireland, one of the region's few successful marine engineering firms.
Painful irony
Further, despite the UK government unveiling a future shipbuilding strategy for navy ships two years ago, the policy implications appear to have been either forgotten or ignored.
But perhaps the most painful irony, as the UK heads towards an abrupt exit from the European Union at the end of October, is that the Harland and Wolff site is today best known as the location of the Titanic Belfast, a museum and visitor attraction.
As former UK Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis tweeted this week, amid surging demand for cruiseships, shipbuilding is tomorrow’s industry as much as yesterday's.
“Yet thanks to terrible political leadership and industrial policy, Britain just has shipyard museums,” he tweeted.
