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Bust of Pirrie in the grounds of Belfast City Hall.

William James Pirrie, 1st Viscount Pirrie, KP, PC (31 May 1847 – 6 June 1924) was a leading Irish shipbuilder and businessman. Born in Quebec, he spent his childhood at Conlig, County Down. Pirrie was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution before entering Harland and Wolff shipyard as a gentleman apprentice in 1862. Twelve years later he was made a partner in the firm, and on the death of Sir Edward Harland in 1895 he became its chairman, a position he was to hold until his death.

Belonging to a prominent family, his nephews included Prime Minister John Miller Andrews, Thomas Andrews, builder of the Titanic and Sir James Andrews, 1st Baronet, the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland.

As well as overseeing the world's largest shipyard, Pirrie was elected Lord Mayor of Belfast in 1896, and was re-elected to the office as well as made an Irish Privy Counsellor the following year. He became Belfast's first honorary freeman in 1898, and also served as High Sheriff of successively County Antrim and County Down. He helped finance the Liberals in Ulster in the 1906 General Election, and that same year, at the height of Harland and Wolff's success, he was created Baron Pirrie, of the City of Belfast. The following year he was appointed Comptroller of the Household of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and in 1908 he was made a Knight of St Patrick.

His support for the 1912 Home Rule Bill lost him favor in Belfast, and he was jeered in the streets after chairing a famous meeting of the Ulster Liberal Association addressed by Winston Churchill. That same year he was to travel aboard the Titanic, but illness prevented him from joining the ill-fated passage. Pro-Chancellor of the Queen's University, Belfast from 1908 to 1914, Lord Pirrie was also in the years before the First World War a member of the Committee on Irish Finance as well as Lieutenant for the City of Belfast (both 1911). During the war he was a member of the War Office Supply Board, and in 1918 became Comptroller-General of Merchant Shipbuilding, organising British production of merchant ships.

In 1921 Pirrie was elected to the Northern Ireland Senate, and that same year was created Viscount Pirrie, of the City of Belfast. He died three years later of pneumonia at sea whilst on a business trip to South America; his body was brought back on White Star Line's RMS Olympic and was buried in Belfast City Cemetery.

In the 1900's Lord Pirrie built the Temple of the Four Winds - the minor remains at ground level of which are on the edge of the Devil's punchbowl, Hindhead. A memorial to Pirrie was unveiled in the grounds of Belfast City Hall in 2006.

• Encyclopedia Titanica Biography of William Pirrie