Menu

Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

Displaying items by tag: Diamond Princess

Evacuated British and Irish nationals from the coronavirus-hit cruise ship (Diamond Princess) in Japan have arrived at a UK hospital where they will spend the next two weeks in quarantine.

Coaches carrying 30 British and two Irish citizens arrived at the Arrowe Park hospital, Birkenhead on the Wirral Peninsula this (Saturday) evening.

The group had travelled from an airbase in Wiltshire after leaving Tokyo on a flight late on Friday night.

They have so far tested negative for the virus.

Arrowe Park Hospital was previously used to quarantine 83 British nationals who were flown back to the UK from Wuhan.

For more BBC News has a report here

Irish citizens are among the hundreds of passengers quarantined on a cruise liner in Japan amid the coronavirus epidemic, the Department of Foreign Affairs has confirmed.

According to RTÉ News, 454 cases of coronavirus have been diagnosed in the Diamond Princess, with a further 99 testing positive for the virus.

The British ship had 3,700 passengers and crew on board when it was initially detained by Japanese authorities in Yokohama on 4 February.

The United States has already evacuated more than 300 citizens and their family from the ocean liner, with 14 positive readings for the virus among them. RTÉ News has more on the story HERE.

As previously reported on Afloat.ie, here the HSE has instituted a new reporting protocol for ships entering Irish ports over the outbreak, which has killed more than 1,700 people in China and a small number abroad.

About Brittany Ferries

In 1967 a farmer from Finistère in Brittany, Alexis Gourvennec, succeeded in bringing together a variety of organisations from the region to embark on an ambitious project: the aim was to open up the region, to improve its infrastructure and to enrich its people by turning to traditional partners such as Ireland and the UK. In 1972 BAI (Brittany-England-Ireland) was born.

The first cross-Channel link was inaugurated in January 1973, when a converted Israeli tank-carrier called Kerisnel left the port of Roscoff for Plymouth carrying trucks loaded with Breton vegetables such as cauliflowers and artichokes. The story, therefore, begins on 2 January 1973, 24 hours after Great Britain's entry into the Common Market (EEC).

From these humble beginnings however, Brittany Ferries as the company was re-named quickly opened up to passenger transport, then became a tour operator.

Today, Brittany Ferries has established itself as the national leader in French maritime transport: an atypical leader, under private ownership, still owned by a Breton agricultural cooperative.

Eighty five percent of the company’s passengers are British.

Key Brittany Ferries figures:

  • Turnover: €202.4 million (compared with €469m in 2019)
  • Investment in three new ships, Galicia plus two new vessels powered by cleaner LNG (liquefied natural gas) arriving in 2022 and 2023
  • Employment: 2,474 seafarers and shore staff (average high/low season)
  • Passengers: 752,102 in 2020 (compared with 2,498,354 in 2019)
  • Freight: 160,377 in 2020 (compared with 201,554 in 2019)
  • Twelve ships operating services that connect France, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain (non-Covid year) across 14 routes
  • Twelve ports in total: Bilbao, Santander, Portsmouth, Poole, Plymouth, Cork, Rosslare, Caen, Cherbourg, Le Havre, Saint-Malo, Roscoff
  • Tourism in Europe: 231,000 unique visitors, staying 2.6 million bed-nights in France in 2020 (compared with 857,000 unique visitors, staying 8,7 million bed-nights in 2019).