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Last modified: November 11, 2006

© Copyright 1999-2006

1996       HARLAND  &  WOLFF  SHIPBUILDERS     

Belfast,    Northern Ireland,    The British Isles

Having previously visited Harlands in the role of Overseer on behalf of my client ITM during the fabrication of the ITM Flexiport in 1984, I returned to prepare structural fabrication drawings using ‘Kockums’ STEARBEAR/TRIBON’ shipbuilding CadCam system.

Projects included the F.P.S.O. newbuilding ‘SCHIEHALLION’ for BP and the oil tanker conversion of the ‘GLAS DOWR’ into an F.P.S.O. for Bluewater b.v., a project I had previously been working on at NEVESBU in Den Hagg, The Netherlands.

Harland & Wolff   builders of many famous ships including the TITANIC & the IMO        (Ref:  Halifax Shipyard - Worlds Largest Explosion before the Atom Bomb)

Flexiport Load-Out on Dyvi Heavy Lift Vessel

Bangor Loch, Belfast

www.harland-wolff.com

Built during 1910-12 with her sister ship. the 0lympic, at Harland and Wolff’s shipbuilding works in Belfast. Ireland, for the British White Star Line. the S.S. Titanic was a super luxury liner 882.5 feet long. 92.5 feet broad, and displacing 45,000 tons.   The Titanic possessed a crews of 700 and was capable of providing  Luxurious    Accommodation for more than 1,500 passengers.

Her tragic deficiency in lifeboats led to the loss of 1.517 passengers and crew members (out of 2,207) when she sank on the  fifth day of her maiden voyage, after striking an iceberg off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland en route from Queenstown  to New York. Many of the victims are buried in a cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  (Ref: Halifax Shipyard - City Flattened by Explosion)

Background: For four years. beginning in 1845, the potato crop in Ireland was destroyed by blight (as it was throughout Europe). Since potatoes were the staple food of the Irish people, famine set in along with typhoid, typhus and scurvy. killing 1.029,552 and causing 1,180,409 to emigrate. mostly to America, thus reducing the population of Ireland by one-fourth. Other sources of food corn, wheat, and cattle— were plentiful, but most of it, under unjust British commerce and navigation laws, was shipped to England. whose leaders were held responsible by most historians for the staggering deaths. The loss of the potato crop for four years was placed at 16 million pounds. about $500 million by today’s standards.

From 1800 and all through the Napoleonic era, Ireland prospered in a wartime economy, but when Wellington’s forces, more than a third of which were Irish. were disbanded in 1815, tens of thousands glutted the labour market.

Coupled to this economic strain were the strict British Corn Laws that imposed impossible tariffs on small landowners in Ireland. All of the country’s rich produce, corn, wheat, oats and rye. and herds of cattle were transported to England, leaving the burgeoning Irish peasantry with one crop and food staple, the potato.

While the population exploded----there were more than five million people in 1800, exceeding the population of the United States—the country was systematically raped of its harvests, and conditions worsened until it became a nation in tattered rags.

In 1817 the Irish novelist William Carleton prophetically described his country as one vast lazarhouse, filled with famine, disease and death."

High-minded, lofty-toned Englishmen toured the stricken country and wrung their hands over the brutal poverty and the semi-starvation prior to 1845.

They came as sightseers, wincing their ways through charnal houses they were bloated with empathy and appeared to be wreaking humane thoughts as they stared from polished carriages and peered through the new glass panes of elegant inns at the wretched, the starving and the dying before them.

The English poet Shelley stated, "The poor of Dublin are assuredly the meanest and most miserable of all, . thousands are huddled together—one mass of animated filth. The rich grind the poor into abjectness, then complain that they are abject. They goad them to famine, and hang them if they steal a loaf."

The English poet Keats also wrote, "The rags, the dirt and the misery of the poor common Irish. A Scotch cottage is a palace to the Irish one."

The English essayist Carlyle: "Never saw such begging in the world. . . Often get in a rage at it. . . beggars storming round you, like ravenous dogs round carrion

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