Displaying items by tag: NATO target smugglers

11th February 2016

NATO to Send Ships to Aegean Sea Over Migrant Crisis

#NATOrefugees- NATO military vessels writes The Irish Times, are to be deployed to the Aegean Sea to help Turkey and Greece crackdown on criminal networks smuggling migrants and refugees into Europe, allied defence ministers said on Thursday.

The move, discussed by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ministers for the first time at a meeting in Brussels, is aimed at helping the continent tackle its worst migration crisis since the second World War, with more than a million asylum seekers arriving last year.

Although the plan is still to be detailed by NATO generals, member states are likely to use ships to work with Turkish and Greek coast guards and the European Union border agency Frontex.

Afloat adds the Irish Naval Service (a non-NATO member) last month had plans in place to deploy another patrol ship, LÉ Roisin (P51) to the Mediterranean Sea. This would be in the event that the next government decides to renew last year’s humanitarian mission to the region.

Also last year, the Defence Budget for 2016 was announced and the White Paper on Defence policy was published, to read more click here.

Published in News Update

Tagged under

New York Yacht Club’s biennial Invitational Cup

Ireland has a proud history in New York Yacht Club’s biennial Invitational Cup, with Irish participation from the very start and a podium result in 2019.

In 2009, two Irish Clubs, Royal St. George in Dun Laoghaire and Royal Cork in Crosshaven, entered into New York's newest sailing competition that was reminiscent of Newport’s America’s Cup days when 19 yacht club teams from 14 nations descended on this “City by the Sea”.

The Rolex New York Yacht Club Invitational Cup is a competition between yacht clubs, with strict eligibility rules ensuring that each team is comprised exclusively of amateur sailors.

The competition, which was first run in 2009, has drawn entries from 49 clubs from 22 nations on all six inhabited continents.

The New York Yacht Club won the inaugural event in 2009, with the Royal Canadian Yacht Club winning in 2011 and 2013, England's Royal Thames Yacht Club winning in 2015 and Southern Yacht Club from New Orleans winning in 2017.

In 2019 the regatta was sailed for the first time in the New York Yacht Club’s fleet of IC37 yachts, and Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, from Australia, became the first Southern Hemisphere club to win the trophy. And it was in this edition that Anthony O’Leary’s Royal Cork team took the bronze medal.