N. IRELAND INDUSTRY NOW AHEAD OF BRITAIN

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 24, 24 November 1948, Page 5

N. IRELAND INDUSTRY NOW AHEAD OF BRITAIN

No Air Of Self Pity In Ulster (By Reece Smith, New Zealand Kemsley Empire Journalist) Belfast, October 18. In Ulster not one person has so far shrugged excuses at me for short comings and pleaded: “After all, the war you know , . . .” While certain other areas of the United Kingdom gird themselves with a dingy self pity, Belfast proudly presents the largest single shipyard in the world, Harland and Wolff’s, brand spanking new and built with the biggest war damage claim in the United Kingdom, compensation for the yard having been flattened in 1941 raids.

A go-ahead engineering firm, in the spacious shops where they built shell cases and Stirling aircraft fuselages during the war, is speeding the production of textile machinery at a rate of 800 tons a month, some of it for New Zealand flax mills.

A linen firm, 20 miles into the countryside from Belfast, since 1945 has put up a loom shop, equipped it with new machines ordered in confidence during the war, and has built itself a new carpet factory to try its luck in a fresh line.

No new loom shop has gone up on Lancashire since 1923, and weavers there say it is impossible for them to 'get new machinery—if they want to —for ten years, as it is all going for export. Yet the cotton men have been at no evident disadvantage beside the linen men in opportunities to modernise, unless the clear air of the Ulster countryside makes for sharper thinking and more commercial courage than Lancashire soot. The Government of Northern Ireland is conservative, with a consequent friendly eye for industry. At the same time, though manufacturers may find building restrictions a shade more lenient than in Britain, and a slight labour surplus in Belfast to be of some help, all raw materials have to be imported to Ulster, and the finished product shipped back to the markets. These transport costs could outweilgh many advantages. ■ The conservatism of the Northern Ireland Government is conditioned. First, its powers are in the main secondary to those exercised in its territory by socialist Whitehall. Second, whatever the political colour of any government of Ulster it would consider the niceties of economic theory trivial stuff beside the nastiness of Neighbour De Valera and Neighbour Costello. Any pro-British Belfast paper is quite capable of editorialising straight faced on “The Atom Bomb and Partition”. (There is no reliable talk thus far of either side having the bomb). Politicians here live and breathe the partition wrangle, thereby creating an atmosphere faintly unworldly to anyone accustomed to the Russians, the Bomb, world starvation and football as senior topics.

An aspect of government policy which might spring from conservative beliefs, or a desire to attract industry, is that the balance of building is tilted more towards industrial enterprise than in Britain. As a result Belfast’s efforts to solve her housing problem grave as anywhere else, are nothing to w■ te home about. Housing estates are going up, but not on a scale comparable to that in Britain. It seems impossible for the present to have your building both ways. In the 1947 season Ulster shipped* to Britain 25 million dozen eggs, 11,629,0001bs of poultry, 161,433 fat cattle and sheep, and more than three million gallons of liquid milk. Not bad for a population smaller than New Zealand’s, yet she stays on British rations.

To lessen the danger in Ulster’s two industry economy, shipping and linen, the government is encouraging other industries to come from England. Biggest catch so far is Courtaulds, paramount British rayon producers, who plan a 300 acre, million pound mill at Carrickfergus Though an abundance of energv in Ulster is spent in standing off Mr De Valera and his unwelcome attentions, there is more left for productive purposes than in several parts of England.