A picture depicting the Harland and Wolff ship building sight in Duncairn, Belfast. The inhabitants of Duncairn suffered greatly when deindustrialisation began putting many people out of jobs, this is one of the reasons why Duncairn still has high levels of deprivation. In the early 20th century the company had approximately 1500 employees during the period of building it’s ‘great liners’ (such as the Titanic) it now however has only 500.
The people put out of a job at this time resulted in a whole generation of people finding it very difficult to try and get a job as they only had the skills for ship building. Such occurrences increase deprivation of areas and cause a downwardspiral of deprivation as the people without skills get trapped there and those who have skills and get jobs and more money move away.
There is optimism for the industry though as it is hoped that Harland and Wolff in Belfast will be the production centre for the UK’s proposed offshore wind turbines. It has also recently seen an increase in the amount of shipbuilding and repairs taking place leading to the re-commission of ‘Goliath’ the crane in 2007 after it was de-commissioned in 2003.
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