DERRY DOOMED IF SHIRT FACTORIES CLOSE

The challenge of cheap imported shirts is kicking the props from under the last major industry in the towns outside Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Isolated 80 miles north west of Ulster's capital, Londonderry, with unemployment already running at 20 per cent, will be worst hit.

With Iceland to the north, the wilds of County Donegal to the west and a two-hour drive to the nearest easterly centre of industry, Derry is not every businessman's first choice.

Generous bait has been laid out by the Derry Development Commission including grants of up to 40 per cent for machinery, equipment and building, tax allowance, free depreciation, loans, factories at low rents, and training grants of up to £15 a week per man he i Maydown industrial estate set up in 1960 on the outskirts of Derry was the earliest and—-after the fighting began in 1969—virtually the only fruit of these lavish concessions.

Firms which set up there include Du Pont, the British Oxygen Company and Molins, the tobacco machinery manufacturers.

Although output has increased, the number of workers employed by these firms and at Derry's three other industrial estates at Pennyburn, Bligh's Lane and Springtown has actually dropped.

The desperation of a situation in which second generation unemployment is now a common feature-fathers and sons-has been recognized by the Tory government. It has announced cash inputs totalling £110m to 'rejuvenate' the area.

Many Derry homes have been kept going by wives and daughters supplementing Social Security payments with their income from work at local shirt factories.

A new bombshell has been dropped into this aiready disastrous employment situation —two of the largest shirt manufacturers, Tillie and Henderson and Hogg and Mitchell may have to close. Others are claimed to be under pressure.

This threat to the livelihoods of hundreds of workers is nothing to do with the sectarian violence which has raged for the last three years.

Only two weeks ago the shirt manufacturers' association warned that up to 70 per cent of the home market had been lost to foreign imports.

The threat to jobs in Derry and in other primarily rural towns dependent on the clothing trades springs entirely from the cut-throat competition manufacturers are forced. to engage in as their markets contract under the impact of world recession.

Urgent talks between the owners of the factories and the Ministry of Commerce are going on. But should they fail, up to 1,200 girls will lose their jobs, further deepening the already fathomless poverty in which scores of families live.

A spokesman for the Ulster Office said that if the factories shut the situation would be 'very serious' Derry is by no means alone in its plight. Isolated towns like Strabane and Newry, for whom the clothing and textile mills and workshops of the 19th century were their lifeblood, share its predicament.

Most of their problems have been caused by the demise of the linen trade. In the eight years up to 1971 production fell by more than a third. • It was replaced by the synthetic fibre production in plants owned by the giant world monopolies , like ICI, Courtauld's and Du Pont. But the branch factories they set up to cash in on the availability of cheap and comparatively docile labour employed few people and were centred around Belfast.

The towns and villages of what has become rural Ulster have been left to fend for themselves. It is significant that it is often in these places, with their high and insoluble unemployment, that violence has been fiercest.

The industry Ulster has sticks close to Belfast, a city where half Ulster's 1,527,293 population lives and works and where businessmen find all the services they need conveniently clustered together. If local markets are not large, at least Belfast has the virtue of being on the coast and therefore closest to the sales possibilities offered by England's industrial north west and Midlands.

In response to sharpening competition output has gone up throughout the troubles— rising from 142 in 1969 on the production index to 157 today. But unemployment has continued to rise.

It now stands at 45,226, or 8.7 per cent, and much of the increased output has come from upped productivity rather than extra employment.

The Ministry of Commerce freely admits that in the last decade and particularly in recent years companies have set up in Ulster because labour is cheap and they have been able to introduce work practices that are unacceptable to workers elsewhere in Britain.

Production has been further helped by the employers, the government and the trade unions impressing on workers that the already tenuous links between the textile giants and the Six Counties would not be strengthened by strikes.

Last year stoppages were down by a third.

Bulk of the jobs lost directly as a result of the troubles have been in the retail sector. and 2,000 workers have been sacked because of closures.

Since 1969 only ten manufacturers have left Ulster as a direct result of the fighting, with a loss of 621 jobs. Shootings and bombings have emptied what were once busy shopping areas and small businesses have been the first to the wall. Shopping multiples, many of them owned outside Ulster, have lasted longer.

Ulster is the Tories' biggest lame duck. And much of its major industry, including Belfast's shipyards, is utterly dependent for its survival on millions of pounds of government aid.

Should the shipyards fail, scores of small engineering factories, already cutting back, would crash with them.

Tory money is propping up the economy of Belfast and much of that of Derry. Aid for the ailing shirt manufacturers will take t the whole hog there too.

The problem amount of Tory money will pump life into dead markets and sooner or later those who pay the government piper will start calling the tune.

Capitalism is to blame for the problems of poverty and unemployment which have dragged on in Ulster for decades.

The closure of Derry's shirt factories, affecting Cathuitc and Protestant workers alike, rams home that it is recession and the employers who are the root cause of Ulster's troubles.

This also points the way to the unity of Northern Ireland's working class, without which it is incapable of joining with British workers and striking decisively at the real enemythe Tory government.