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Displaying items by tag: Urged to Buy

#WaterfrontProperty - Victoria Dockyard an eight-acre site in Passage West which is up for sale needs to be purchased by the State or Cork County Council in order for a development that benefits the town centre to be built there, TDs have warned.

As the Evening Echo reports, the site was once home to the Royal Victoria Dockyard where ships were built for over 100 years and where over 1,000 people were employed during WW1. It contains several hundred metres of road frontage, three access points and six terraced houses encompassed in a stone wall boundary.

Previous owners Howard Holdings had planned to build a hotel on the site after a €25m purchase in the early 2000s but then sold it to the Doyle Shipping Group (DSG) for €2.75m. It has recently been utilised as a steel scrapyard and is being offered on the open market for around €3.5m.

The current occupier would have to move out once the sale is completed and the buyer would be free to use it as they see fit within planning regulations. The site has been on the open market since September of last year.

It is unlikely its current use will continue once it is sold. To read more on the story click here.

The private quay at Passage West is where last month Afloat.ie featured an Irish owned cargoship involved (not in scrap-trading) but the loading of wood-chip bound for Scotland.  

Published in West Cork

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).