October 21 1924
The men employed in the Derry Shipbuilding Yard have been added to that city’s formidable roll of unemployed. “In view of the impossibility of securing shipbuilding contracts except at a heavy pecuniary loss”, the Company must close down the Yard “until an improvement in the situation warrants a resumption”.
Hundreds of families are directly affected by this announcement; scores of shopkeepers are bound to suffer – almost as directly. When an important industry is suspended, no one can estimate the real extent of the losses incurred. Dublin workers’ folly ruined a Dublin Shipbuilding Company, and a few thousand men were thrown out of employment. A majority of them left the city – most for other countries; those who managed to remain were glad to get back to work under the rule of a great British firm quite recently. The Dublin Yard has been re-opened just as news comes of the failure in Derry – a temporary failure, let us hope.
Thoughtful citizens of “the Capital of the North-West” have long been deeply concerned about its future; a leading merchant writes from the Foyleside under yesterday’s date to say that “uneasiness has developed into genuine anxiety, and, amongst many, into despair”. He says:
“The situation is becoming really desperate. If existing conditions are maintained until next Summer, the Twelfth of July may not see half-a-dozen solvent traders in Derry City. Our Donegal customers have fallen away despite frantic efforts to hold them in the face of Customs duties and difficulties scarcely less ruinous than the worst the tax-gatherers over the border can do. Out trade with Derry County and Tyrone is rapidly passing to Belfast. Commercial travellers from your great centre are more numerous than flies over areas formerly monopolised by Derry traders, and they are undercutting us mercilessly. You will see it stated in the Derry Journal that ‘one prominent firm whose principal was on the Partitionist platform in the Guildhall is stated on reliable authority to be paying over £1,000 per annum in duty to the Free State’. I am a Nationalist, though a mild politician, and I pay about £300 in duties on goods in the vain effort to hold my old customers amongst the retailers in Donegal towns, but this system cannot be practised for another 12 months”.
