MULTINATIONALS
There were, however, worrying underlying features whose significance would become more fully apparent in the succeeding decades. Most important was the fact that while protected firms enjoyed large absolute increases in sales on the buoyant home market, they failed to break into export markets. McALEESE (1978) calculates that the proportion of gross output exported by these firms was a mere 19 per cent in 1973, the same as in 1960. This had adverse implications for firm size, degree of specialisation, and long-term viability. In Northern Ireland the process of structural change affecting traditional industry continued during the 1960s, being part of a wider pattern of decline in the older industrial regions of the UK. The linen mills continued to layoff workers. Employment in the food, drink and tobacco sector stagnated, and there was some decline in older clothing companies. In the precarious business of aircraft manufacture Shorts sought to diversity its range of products but without marked success. The most concentrated job losses were in shipbuilding. By the late 1950s the market conditions facing British builders were radically different from the sellers' market of less than a decade earlier. On the supply side a formidable range of new competitors-Sweden, West Germany, Japan-had arisen. These new yards incorporated advanced technologies and high levels of mechanisation. ...>>>

The MULTINATIONALS
Similarly, demand for coastal vessels, another specialism of the Belfast yards, was adversely affected by developments in land transport, especially the elaboration of road networks and the greater use of lorries. The rapidly growing areas of world demand for shipping related to big, relatively simple vessels such as tankers and the larger dry- cargo vessels. To a considerable extent these were standardised products. This change in the composition of demand favoured new, purpose-built yards in Europe and the Far East which were designed for flow-line production. But there was more to the problems of Harland & Wolff than declining competitiveness, simply conceived. As GEARY & JOHNSON point out, the world market for ships was distorted by government subsidies and other imperfections, to which the British government developed no effective response. The only real alternative, perhaps, was the ruthless one of closure. ....>>>