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Displaying items by tag: Lecture: 1916 Maritime Aspects

#1916maritime - The Winter lecture 2015/16 season of the Glenua Sailing Centre concludes with a lecture entitled: ‘Maritme Aspects of the 1916 Rising’ by Dr Edward Bourke.

The illustrated lectures will take place on Thursday 14 April (20:00hrs) at the Poolbeg Yacht & Boat Club, Ringsend, Dublin. There will be an entry fee of €5 in aid of the R.N.L.I.

Edward Bourke is an industrial microbiologist recently retired from brewery research. He is also maritime historian and has published five books on Irish shipwrecks as well as a history of Guinness. Currently he is working on the role of intelligence during the war of Independence in Ireland.

In his illustrated lecture, Edward will explore several maritime aspects of the 1916 events. Foremost among them being the role played by the Royal Navy in suppressing The Rising by strategic interventions.

He will assess the view that the impact of the Helga is greatly exaggerated on the basis that most of the shelling of Dublin was done by field artillery or whether the import of guns for the Volunteers in 1914 was carefully controlled by the British authorities. How plausible is the opinion that the navy had ample forewarning of the intentions of the Volunteers but allowed the 1916 Rising to proceed?

Edward will also discuss the significance of the 1916 rising in the wider context of the Great European War.

Published in Boating Fixtures

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).