IRISH communists have joined calls for the nationalisation of Belfast’s iconic Harland & Wolff shipyard, saying the yard’s demise shows the British Conservative government’s national shipbuilding strategy is “an abject failure.”

Harland & Wolff workers pledged to continue an occupation of the site last week, despite it going into administration following difficulties that the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) blamed on “the drive by monopoly capitalism to seek out greater profits, shifting manufacturing to the Global South [and] exploiting local unregulated workers in sweatshops for poverty pay.”

The CPI welcomed the fact that “despite more than a century’s experience of bigotry in the history of Harland & Wolff, working people from both communities joined together against the closure of the yard and demanded its nationalisation.” The demands put by the Unite and GMB unions are backed by Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, but Boris Johnson’s government has ignored them.

The party added that nationalising the shipyard could be part of “building a sustainable engineering base in Ireland, developing an all-Ireland industrial strategy.”