The builder of the Titanic is struggling to stay afloat

When it built the in 1911, Harland and Wolff was the world’s biggest shipyard. Where it once employed 35,000 people, there are now just a few hundred workers. But the 163-year-old company remains an institution whose significance to Belfast outweighs its size. Its own increasingly desperate struggle to stay afloat is of symbolic importance to the city and the wider shipbuilding industry. It also provides clues to the willingness of the new Labour government to help out troubled firms.The company was central to the boom which built Belfast into a manufacturing behemoth of the early 20th century. The yard’s massive yellow gantry cranes, Samson and Goliath, have become emblematic of Northern Ireland’s capital. A marble statue of Edward Harland still stands outside Belfast city hall. The firm he built has a darker resonance, too. As Ireland moved towards partition in 1920, more than 2,000 Catholic workers were violently expelled from the yard. To this day, just 10% of its workforce is Catholic.