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Displaying items by tag: Ship building

To the vast majority of people, when shipbuilding in Ireland is mentioned, they think only of Belfast, the Harland & Wolff shipyard and the tragic maiden voyage of the Titanic in 1912.

However, there was a vibrant shipbuilding industry in Dublin for nearly two centuries and the story of the different shipyards, the ships they produced and the people who worked there is told here for the first time. Pat Sweeney provides a comprehensive examination of the origins and progress of shipbuilding and ship repair on the Liffey, and documents the progression of the shipbuilding industry in Dublin from its early days at the Walpole and Webb shipyard, through the boom periods of the First and Second World Wars, to the gradual decline of the industry in the late twentieth century. 

Pat Sweeney was the Editor of the Maritime Institute of Ireland's journal for 22 years. He was also the only Dublin-based photographer for Lloyds List, London's premier shipping journal, and has contributed several articles on Irish and international shipping to the Irish Independent.

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Liffey Ships & Shipbuilding is published in paperback at €19.99

Published in Book Review

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).