Thanks to a couple of conversations last winter with Irish musicians, Johnny Mulhern and Wally Page, I started to wonder about Dublin's shipbuilding industry as they mentioned that there had been a reasonably large number of Belfast guys working in that industry at one time.
I had a look at
"A History of the Port of Dublin", by H. A. Gilligan, published by Gill and Macmillan in 1988, when I was in Dublin yesterday. It contained a fairly detailed chapter about shipbuilding in Dublin and another one about the ship owners. I think Workman and Clarke, who owned a Belfast yard known as the "wee yard", had a connection with the Dublin Dockyard Co. at one stage. Both companies closed in 1928.
"Dublin Waters: the Liffey, the canals and the port", on the National Archives of Ireland website, mentions the Dublin Dockyard Company (1850-1881) and the shipbuilder Smellie of Hollybrook Park, Clontarf.
Other shipbuilders, the Ringsend Dockyard Company (known as McMillan’s) and Vickers (Ireland) Ltd. (which at a later stage was known as the Liffey Dockyard Company) were building steel motor canal boats for the Grand Canal Company in the 1920s. The first one 31M was built by the Ringsend Dockyard Company (1913-1963) at a cost of £1000. In fact between 1925 and 1939 this company built most of the forty-eight barges. The Company also built the Barge 76M om 1937.
http://homepage.eircom.net/~barge76m/index.htmlhttp://web.archive.org/web/20071118172503/http://www.heritageboatassociation.ie/vesselsCMCWp4GCCoAndBolinderOk.htmThe MV
"Cill Airne", a former passenger tender, which was one of the last riveted-built ships in Europe and also one of the last vessels from the Liffey Dockyard, Dublin served forty five years as a nautical training ship in Cork. Cill Airne returned to Dublin in May last year and began a new career as a restaurant, wine bar and excursion venue on the river Liffey.
Source: Ships Monthly 2007. The British Shipyards site mentions the following shipyards in Dublin .. Dublin Dockyard Co., Walpole & Webb, Walpole, Webb & Bewley & Co., Ross & Walpole, Dublin Dockyard Co Ltd., Dublin Dockyard Co., Vickers (Ireland) Ltd and the Liffey Dockyard Co Ltd
http://oceania.pbwiki.com/British+shipyards
