Industry, Or Not

The workers in the factory produced fabrics and dyes for fabrics, he said. The high steel perimeter gates were rusted brown by the sea air that fills every breath within a half mile of the shore at Belfast Lough. From the outside it looked like a place that made men of its workers. The incessant grey steel and the brick-built buildings fell and landed jaggedly as far off the Belfast Road as they did along it. The buildings beyond those gates were different colours, heights, and lengths, as if built in a hurry by brickies with some inkling of a plan, perhaps several. Two figure-of-eight chimneys threw a curve in the severe grey lines, and they spewed dirt into the salty air as grizzly men worked to a sweat to produce one part of something. Someone would add something else to that part of something; dip it, maybe, into some chemical or cleanser; send it on to someone else who would treat it or cut it down to the size of something else, something that those who worked on it would probably never recognise, and could probably never afford. 

The factory was vast and dirty, and those who worked there militant and unforgiving, as my father discovered that day he crossed the picket line to get into work during the Ulster Workers’ Council strike. The Council called the strike to protest the recently signed Sunningdale Agreement, an arrangement between the British and the Irish governments that allowed the government in the south some small say in the running of the six very troubled British-controlled counties in the north. The majority Protestant population saw it as a first step toward losing the sovereignty of Northern Ireland, a minor sharing of power that could never be too minor.