So the grass is finally growing green on the slipways in the shipyard, fulfilling the prophecies of some older nationalists and the wishes of others. Seen for generations as the industrial arm of the old Stormont, the yard symbolised for many the political culture of the Northern Ireland state – a closed shop for Catholics.
As the largest single employer during prolonged periods of high unemployment, its economic influence inevitably extended into unionist political patronage. Its demise now coincides with reform of the state it so often symbolised.
Although the yard produced beacons of wisdom, including Sam Thompson's play Over the Bridge, its employment patterns shaped long term Protestant and Catholic attitudes to the state and its administration.
This was most obvious in education. Denied access to the heart of our manufacturing industry, generations of working class Catholics immersed themselves in the new educational opportunities presented by the post war welfare state. It was an immersion which would ultimately underpin the civil rights movement and the rest, as they say, is history.
Many working-class Protestants in Belfast believed that the yard would always provide and thus they saw less need for academic education. The poor pass rates in the 11-plus on the Shankill Road may still be a hangover from that belief. Like Stormont, the yard ultimately failed those it pretended to provide for.
It was interesting therefore that the BBC offered a sanitised version of Harlands at its demise, portraying it as a folksy situation comedy. It was as if a favourite pub had closed and it was left to Sir Reg Empey to instil a sense of the hardship and danger which working there actually entailed.
Significant though the end of shipbuilding is in political and social terms, its real loss is economic. Built on the now crumbled pillars of linen and shipbuilding, our economy has yet to catch the electronic revolution. The Celtic Tiger has not progressed beyond Dundalk.
Thus the loss of the yard is a severe blow to the old economic order and the new order is too heavily dependent on fast food outlets, heritage centres and the public sector. We can never regain the critical industrial mass which Harlands generated.
Celebrating what great craic it all was somehow misses the point, because despite its political imperfections the yard produced and nurtured an amazingly high level of skills – by far the best in the world at that time. Without natural resources we need world class skills. But we now have only one significantly large manufacturing industry left – Bombardier Aerospace (Shorts).
Devoid of the political trappings which in the past marred the shipyard's image, Shorts is renowned not just for being at the cutting edge of manufacturing technology, but for its commitment to fair employment, transparency and equality.
Our future political stability depends on – among other things – economic prosperity. Without a significant manufacturing base Northern Ireland faces an uncertain economic future. Shorts can provide the core of that future – or it could if it were not currently facing the prospect of losing 1,200 of its 6,000 jobs.
The essential difficulty is that the parent company, Bombardier, has to raise substantial amounts of cash to shore up its balance sheets and stop its debt falling to junk status. The global demand for the corporate jet business has been over-estimated. Bombardier needs some money.
The job of attracting inward investment into this country rests with Invest Northern Ireland. Already this year it has handed back £30 millions which it cannot spend even though the number of jobs being created by incoming foreign firms here is at its lowest level for many years.
In 2001/2 aided inward investors generated only 313 jobs. Shorts could do with some of that unwanted £30 millions. If the direct giving of state money to private industry smacks too much of old Labour for this government, they might consider alternative methods of preserving the threatened 1,200 jobs.
God forbid that Shorts would ever go the way of Harlands but without state support it could happen.
And now that the yard has largely fallen silent what should become of the twin cranes Samson and Goliath? Perhaps their most fitting role would be to leave them as a memorial to the skills and brains of Belfast's working class, as a monument to the futility of sectarianism and as a stark reminder to Invest Northern Ireland to get a move on.
