Liffey Ships and Shipbuilding
By Pat Sweeney
(Mercier Press, €19.99)
Peter Costello
Recent visitors to Belfast will know how the tourist business there now seems to be built around the theme of ''The Titanic City''. Perhaps only Ulstermen could build a business on the back of a terrible disaster.
However, many must come away with the impression that Belfast was the only place in Ireland where ships were built. In this fascinating piece of social and industrial history, Pat Sweeney, who has devoted years to the maritime life of Ireland, very successfully puts it right.
Mr Sweeny picks up the course of his story in the years of the 16th and 17th Century. But the records are often scarce and the achievements little known. So really it is with the last century that the story begins, when at last wooden ships were giving way to ones contracted of steel. None rivalled Titanic, though some even ''went foreign'', to Canada, India and Latin America.
What he calls ''the 20th Century revival'' led to the development of two yards, and later to the take over of the operations by Vickers. This, of course, made the Liffey works a part of the British ship building effort in peace and war. The Emergency saw the yards working to maintain the Irish merchant marine, not without a cost in lives lost at sea.
Alas the years after 1945 are less heroic. But then shipbuilding over the last half of the century lost ground in England and Scotland as well. Jobs were exported to lower wage economies, such as Korea.
These days Dublin's Docklands have become a symbol of another aspect of our involvement with the global economy, the effects of which we are still living through. The are undoubtedly many surprises to come from the redevelopment of the district which Pat Sweeny writes about with much loving and enthusiastic detail.
It is not likely we will see ships built again along the mouth of the Liffey. But this books reminds us, in a city which notoriously turns its back on the sea, just what Dublin owes to its maritime past.
The book is not only the result of very detailed archive research, it shows too the benefit of Pat Sweeney's skills as a professional photographer in recording so many of the ships while they were still sea-going.
Attractively produced, this is not just a book for the enthusiast, but for anyone at all interested, not just in Dublin's past, but in a much neglected aspect of our national history.
Over the last few months I have heard three different Government ministers, including Mr Cowen, extolling the importance of ''heritage'' to tourism and the creation of those all important ''bed-nights'' around which our economy seems to spins.
The ship builders chronicled in these pages are part of that heritage, part of the heritage which the Maritime Institute of Ireland museum was set up to foster, but which central funding has neglected. Let us hope that Pat Sweeny's excellent book will be a foundation on which a new future for Ireland's total maritime heritage may be built.
