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Displaying items by tag: New Military Medal

#CrewMedal - The Defence Forces writes The Irish Independent, have awarded a new military medal to members who have been deployed on humanitarian missions.

It will be presented to personnel who have taken part in overseas missions with the prior approval of the Government.

Up to now, the military have been awarded medals by either the United Nations, the EU or Nato for most missions outside of the State.

But those deployed on humanitarian missions, such as the current Operation Pontus, where the Naval Service have been rescuing migrants from the Mediterranean since last year, have not been similarly recognised.

The decision to award the new medal was announced yesterday by Minister with responsibility for Defence, Paul Kehoe, when he visited the captain and crew of LE James Joyce in Cagliari in Sardinia. The presentation of the medals will take place in Rosslare, Co Wexford, next month.

LE James Joyce is the fifth Naval vessel to have been deployed since the Irish joined the Mediterranean mission in May last year.

Sixteen bodies have been recovered so far by the 59-strong crew of LE James Joyce and a total of 1,882 migrants, including 56 children, have been rescued.

Published in Navy

Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.