The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Shipyard famed for Titanic saved with £6m rescue
Deal: Workers ‘vindicated’ as firm buys UK giant
A closure-threatened Belfast shipyard famed for building the Titanic has been saved.
Harland and Wolff has been bought for £6 million by InfraStrata, a London-based company that specialises in energy infrastructure projects.
All workers at the plant who did not take voluntary redundancy when the yard went into administration – 79 in total – will now keep their jobs.
InfraStrata said it planned to increase the size of the workforce by several hundred over the next five years.
Chief executive John Wood said: “Harland and Wolff is a landmark asset and its reputation as one of the finest multi-purpose fabrication facilities in Europe is testament to its highly-skilled team in Belfast.”
Workers have occupied the site since the business went into administration in the summer, undertaking a high-profile campaign to save their jobs.
Yesterday morning there was a celebratory mood at the gates of the yard as workers changed the wording of their Save Our Shipyard banner to We Saved Our Shipyard.
Steel worker and employee representative Joe Passmore said the workers were “absolutely delighted”.
He said they hope to get back to work as early as tomorrow.
“It vindicates everything that we believed in from the start,” he said.
The shipyard, whose famous yellow cranes Samson and Goliath dominate the east Belfast skyline, employed more than 30,000 people during the city’s industrial heyday but the workforce numbered only around 125 when the company went under.
The business had diversified away from shipbuilding in the last two decades, shifting to work on wind energy and marine engineering projects.
Known around the world for building the doomed Titanic, which sank on her maiden transatlantic voyage in 1912 after striking an iceberg, Harland and Wolff was one of the UK’s key industrial producers during the Second World War, supplying almost 150 warships.