Category: Social

Following a couple of nights of civil unrest, I exercise my white, middle-class, male privilege to think about what’s going wrong in Northern Ireland:

In the aftermath: how disenfranchised and disengaged with the status quo must you be if rioting is more attractive than any other activity?

Steven replied:

@cimota Lower east, seems to still be reeling from loss of shipyard/shorts, real lack of something to aspire to.

My reply:

@playfordrants Yeah, of course I think that building leisure yachts would be a good solution.

Stevens last reply:

@cimota whether its wind turbines or whatever something needs done we have ceased to be a society that actually seems to make anything?

While I may focus on the “digital media” microcosm and it gets a decent amount of attention because it is seen as an easy win for global reach and income generation, it’s sobering to remember that we remain the minority.

We used to have a thriving linen industry. During the 18th Century, a fifth of the worlds linen was shipped from Belfast. We used to make ships and planes. In 1912, Harland and Wolff was the largest shipyard in the world and Shorts was the first aircraft manufacturing company in the world.

Since the 1970s, more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost from Belfast – a situation made worse by the escalation of “The Troubles”.

And no, I wasn’t joking about building leisure yachts. We used to be good at this stuff (East Belfast Sailing Club is still renowned as somewhere to build ferrocement hulls).

So, how would we get back into the swing of things? How do we move upwards in the value chain?

My friend George runs a little manufacturing company in County Down. He’s a craftsman himself:

So far I have resisted the temptation to invest in ‘lean manufacturing’ techniques (which include extensive use of computer controlled machines) and have instead, built a team of real craftsmen who build Lowden guitars by hand using Japanese chisels, planes, knives and spokeshaves. It would have been much more economical to make our guitars with assembly workers and machines, but our choice is to build skills and understanding of wood, and in so doing the guitars feel and sound like individual ‘works of art’”.

So why can’t we do this in other areas? I’m not sure we can create 100,000 new craftsman jobs in the three years that we’d be allotted under an official work programme but we need to have that vision. It’s not about creating low end jobs or even really high value jobs – it’s about the middle ground. How do we raise the level of the lower end jobs – and to my reckoning, it’s about skills.

I had a debate with my co-worker about how to achieve some of this. He says I’m a top down thinker and he’s a bottom up thinker. Whereas I want to start programmes, he reckons I need to raise aspirations and allow them to think for themselves. My response is simple: if it were that easy, it wouldn’t be needed. We need to give people something to aspire to. Spread the story of master craftsmen like George and his team. Bring in existing master craftsmen across multiple industries and engage them in doing stuff. We have all of this empty space in Titanic Quarter and beside it on the old Sirocco works site – just beside where the unrest happened. I do not believe this to be coincidence.

And if it was me, I’d want to be involved in building boats.