Menu

Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

Displaying items by tag: Strike

Halloween decorations, DIY materials and heavy machinery deliveries bound for Ireland could face delays as a two-week dockers’ strike at the port of Liverpool gets underway.

At least 560 workers were due to walk out of the port last night in a dispute over pay, according to the Unite trade union, just hours after Queen Elizabeth’s funeral and the end of a 10-day national mourning period.

The strike will affect the Port of Liverpool’s container division until October 3, although other operations – cruises, trailer traffic and bulk cargo – will be unaffected, the port said in a statement.

Although Liverpool does not handle time-sensitive food or other perishable goods bound for Ireland, it is a hub for goods coming in via container ship from Asia and the United States including goods destined for Irish retailers.

“Any disruption in England has a knock-on impact for Ireland,” said Aidan Flynn, chief executive of the Freight Transport Association of Ireland. “It’s like a concertina effect. Things get squeezed.” 

Independent.ie has more here on the strike on Merseyside. 

Published in Ports & Shipping

#FERRY NEWS - Industrial action by French crews with Brittany Ferries is still disrupting the company's ferry services from Cork to Roscoff.

As previously reported on Afloat.ie, a series of wildcat strikes by staff protesting against changes to their working terms and conditions began last Friday 21 September.

The action led to the cancellation of sailings on the weekend-only round-trip Cork route until further notice.

Passengers intending to travel from Cork have been advised to seek passage instead on Celtic Ferries' Rosslare-to-Cherbourg route or Irish Ferries' Rosslare services to Cherbourg.

Published in Brittany Ferries

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).