By Christopher Lawson–
Two cranes, Samson and Goliath, loom over the skyline of Belfast, a testament to the city’s rich industrial heritage. Although their owner, Harland & Wolff, survived its latest brush with bankruptcy in 2019, the shipyard’s workforce is now counted in the tens rather than the tens of thousands. Belfast’s other internationally famous industry, linen textiles, is also a shadow of its former self. In the 1950s, approximately a third of workforce in Northern Ireland was employed in manufacturing industries. By the late 1980s, this proportion had dropped to 20 per cent, and in March 2020 it stood at just 11 per cent. Contemporary Northern Ireland is a largely post-industrial society.
In his 2016 article, economic historian Jim Tomlinson wrote that deindustrialisation deserves to be understood as the ‘meta-narrative’ of postwar British history.[1] The impact of deindustrialisation can be seen not only in the remaking of the UK economy, but also in the reshaping of society, politics, and culture. It has torn apart communities, changed the physical landscape beyond recognition, and often accentuated pre-existing inequalities of race, class, and gender.[2]
Of course, the history of postwar Northern Ireland already has a well-established ‘meta-narrative’. The ‘Troubles’ have left deep scars in Northern Ireland, and it is right that they remain at the centre of historical study. However, this does not mean that there is no space for the study of deindustrialisation. Quite the opposite. Far from an either-or situation, a thoughtful and considered analysis of the deindustrialisation of Northern Ireland can add nuance, depth, and context to our study of the ‘Troubles’, and vice versa. Focusing primarily on Belfast, this piece will identify some of the scholarly advances that such an analysis could produce.
First, there is the obvious question: what role did deindustrialisation have in causing and/or aggravating sectarian conflict? Perhaps surprisingly, Robert White and J. L. P. Thompson argue that economic conditions did not influence the timing or intensity of violence in Northern Ireland.[3] However, James Honaker found that when unemployment figures are disaggregated into separate rates for Catholics and Protestants, ‘unemployment becomes a significant causal mechanism for the intensity of conflict’ in a given neighbourhood.[4]
Regardless of our ability to draw a direct causal link, the outbreak of sectarian conflict needs to be viewed in the context of the profound economic challenges that Northern Ireland faced in the 1960s. Between 1962 and 1968, the linen and shipbuilding industries collectively shed about 30,000 jobs. These losses were felt hardest in working class Belfast neighbourhoods like Ballymacarrett, Ardoyne, and the Shankill, which would soon become sites of particularly intense sectarian conflict. The rapid decline of linen was especially disastrous for Catholic areas of West Belfast, whose residents already faced considerable job discrimination and significantly higher rates of unemployment. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Lagan, Harland & Wolff was seen as the crown jewel of ‘Protestant Belfast’, and failure of the Unionist government to prevent the steady run-down of the shipyard seriously weakened its political and cultural hold on the Protestant working class. Maura Sheehan and Mike Tomlinson have argued that the shockingly high unemployment in many working-class urban areas, a direct result of deindustrialisation, ‘provided a constant source of out of work recruits for both the IRA and the Protestant extremists.’[5]
Secondly, what do we discover when we reverse the causal relationship, and explore the impact of the ‘Troubles’ on the process of deindustrialisation? One might expect the ‘Troubles’ to have significantly damaged Northern Ireland’s already fragile economy, but this was not necessarily the case. In 1960, Northern Ireland’s GDP per capita was 63 per cent of the UK average. By 1980, it had actually risen to 80 per cent of the UK average (as of 2020, it has fallen back to about 75 per cent).[6] This rise is partly due to much higher levels of government spending. Depending on how it is calculated, government spending per capita in Northern Ireland in 1980-81 was 30 to 35 per cent higher than the UK average. And this higher spending was a direct response to the ‘Troubles’. It was widely feared that further industrial decline would aggregate conflict, and so both Labour and Conservative direct rule governments spent considerable sums on employment schemes, including the infamous, failed DeLorean factory in Dunmurry.[7] Even Margaret Thatcher, champion of free enterprise and ‘market discipline’, was forced to provide significant state aid to Harland & Wolff and other key industries. Thus, the ‘Troubles’ had a profound impact on the economic and business history of modern Northern Ireland, even if not in the ways we might initially expect.
However, in specific local contexts, it is clear that the ‘Troubles’ did indeed accelerate and aggravate the process of deindustrialisation. Four of the forty businesses on the Shankill Road were damaged by bombings during the first five years of conflict. Roadblocks put in place along primary interfaces made it difficult for residents in the Falls and Shankill to travel to other parts of the city for work, exacerbating the already serious unemployment problem. A Ministry of Commerce brief in 1973 noted that businesses, particularly those controlled by foreign investors, were afraid to locate to the Falls or Shankill because of their ‘violent reputation’. The problem was not simply the lack of jobs. The Ministry of Manpower Services, also in 1973, attempted to place forty-nine unemployed men in open jobs at the vast Mackie’s engineering facility on the Springfield Road. Of the forty-nine, nine men were hired on the spot, twelve were deemed unsuitable or unavailable for the shifts required, twelve refused a job offer, and sixteen failed to attend the interview. Of the twelve that refused, three said it was because they were ‘afraid of the area’.
The social and cultural legacies of deindustrialisation are also intertwined with those of the ‘Troubles’. Local organisations, like the Shankill Community Council and the Ardoyne People’s Assembly, grew out of the turmoil and upheaval of the late 1960s and 1970s and are often studied and understood in the context of the ‘Troubles’. However, they were equally a response to the profound impact of deindustrialisation on the social fabric of these communities. Such organisations filled the voids created by government neglect and abandonment in the face of these challenges. The Shankill Community Council was consciously modelled after similar organisations in deindustrialising Liverpool, and it fought particularly hard for improved daycare facilities and retraining opportunities for unemployed women so that they could adapt to the post-industrial economic reality.
And finally, modern redevelopment projects like the Titanic Quarter, designed to be physical manifestations of the ‘peace dividend’, are also the product of deindustrialisation. They often exploit the appeal of heritage nostalgia while excluding the working class from the very spaces that they helped to build.[8] These sites are the perfect encapsulation of the complex ways in which the legacies of the ‘Troubles’ and deindustrialisation are intertwined in contemporary Belfast.
Thus, the modern history of Belfast should be understood as the history of a city which suffered through two simultaneous, interconnected calamities. And while I have focussed here on Belfast, other communities (especially those west of the Bann) faced even deeper economic challenges in the mid-to-late twentieth century, which similarly had a complex bi-directional relationship with the sectarian conflict.
The study of deindustrialisation has much to add to our present understanding of the origins, outcomes, and legacies of the ‘Troubles’ – this piece has only scratched the surface. I hope this will become an expanding and deepening strand of interdisciplinary research in the years to come.
[1] Jim Tomlinson, ‘De-Industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-Narrative for Post-war British History’, Twentieth-Century British History 27 (2016): 76-99, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwv030.
[2] For a review of the rapidly growing literature on deindustrialisation across the global north, see Christopher Lawson, ‘Making Sense of the Ruins: The Historiography of Deindustrialization and its Continued Relevance in Neo-liberal Times’, History Compass, published online 6 July 2020, https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12619.
[3] J. L. P. Thompson, ‘Deprivation and Political Violence in Northern Ireland, 1922-1985. A Time-Series Analysis’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 33 (1989): 676-699; Robert White, ‘On Measuring Political Violence: Northern Ireland, 1969 to 1980’, American Sociological Review 58 (1993): 575-585.
[4] James Honaker, ‘Unemployment and Violence in Northern Ireland: A Missing Data Model for Ecological Inference’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 2005.
[5] Maura Sheehan & Mike Tomlinson, The Unequal Unemployed: Discrimination, Unemployment and State Policy in Northern Ireland (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1999), 84.
[6] Graham Brownlow, ‘Business and Labour Since 1945’, in Ulster since 1600: Politics, Economy, and Society, eds. Liam Kennedy & Philip Ollerenshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 292.
[7] Graham Brownlow, ‘Back to the Failure: An Analytic Narrative of the De Lorean Debacle,’ Business History 57, no. 1 (2015): 156-181.
[8] Pete Hodson, ‘Titanic Struggle: Memory, Heritage and Shipyard Deindustrialization in Belfast’ History Workshop Journal 87 (2019): 224-249; Phil Ramsey, ‘‘A Pleasingly Blank Canvas’: Urban Regeneration in Northern Ireland and the Case of Titanic Quarter,’ Space and Polity 17 (2013): 164-179.
(Image: © Christopher Lawson)
Dr. Christopher Lawson recently completed his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. He will take up a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto in September 2020. His PhD dissertation, Nothing Left but Smoke and Mirrors: Deindustrialisation and the Remaking of British Communities, 1957-1994, is a comprehensive study of deindustrialisation and its impact on towns and cities across the UK. His review article on the present state of deindustrialisation studies, ‘Making Sense of the Ruins: The Historiography of Deindustrialization and its Continued Relevance in Neo-liberal Times’, was published in History Compass in July 2020. You can follow him on Twitter at @ChristopherL_TO.
Writing the 'Troubles' 