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Displaying items by tag: UN Year of the Seafarer 2010

Tomorrow ( Sunday 19 September) is World Maritime Day. The event is to be marked in Ireland with a broadcast by RTE Radio 1 (LW) at 12.00 noon of a service conducted by Canon Adrian Empey, chaplain to the Mission to Seafarers, and a sermon preached by Jim Wallace.
The annual event is organised by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) with the exact date left to individual Governments but is usually celebrated during the last week in September. The day is used to focus attention on the importance of shipping safety, maritime security and the marine environment and to emphasize a particular aspect of IMO's work.

To mark the occasion, the Secretary-General of IMO prepares a special message and this is backed up by a paper which discusses selected subjects in greater depth. The content of which is available on an audio MP3 file that can be downloaded by logging onto www.imo.org

The United Nations has designated 2010 as the UN Year of the Seafarer which incorporates World Maritime Day. The IMO will officially celebrate World Maritime Day at the organisation's London headquarters on the banks of the River Thames on Thursday, 23 September.

Published in Boating Fixtures

William M Nixon has been writing about sailing in Ireland and internationally for many years, with his work appearing in leading sailing publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been a regular sailing columnist for four decades with national newspapers in Dublin, and has had several sailing books published in Ireland, the UK, and the US. An active sailor, he has owned a number of boats ranging from a Mirror dinghy to a Contessa 35 cruiser-racer, and has been directly involved in building and campaigning two offshore racers. His cruising experience ranges from Iceland to Spain as well as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and he has raced three times in both the Fastnet and Round Ireland Races, in addition to sailing on two round Ireland records. A member for ten years of the Council of the Irish Yachting Association (now the Irish Sailing Association), he has been writing for, and at times editing, Ireland's national sailing magazine since its earliest version more than forty years ago