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#dublinbay - Multimillion-euro projects planned for Dún Laoghaire Harbour, reports The Irish Times, have been thrown into question, including a €5 million urban beach, a €51 million diaspora centre, and a €30 million cruise berth facility.

Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council has said there is no money for many, if not all, of the plans in advance of the publication of a new economic study on the viability of the proposals.

The proposals were put forward by the Dún Laoghaire Harbour Company, which no longer operates the harbour.

The council took control of the harbour last year at the behest of Minister for Transport Shane Ross. The decision left many councillors unhappy, as the Minister did not provide funding to meet the estimated €30 million cost of carrying out structural repairs at the harbour.

In a progress report on integrating the harbour into the local authority which was presented to councillors on Monday night, council management said there was no money for many of the projects proposed for the harbour.

However, council management also said it had secured Government funding under the Urban Regeneration and Development Fund to draw up a “spatial and economic action study” which would make recommendations in relation to “potential economic opportunities for the town of Dún Laoghaire, including the harbour”.

Further reading on the story can be made by clicking here. 

 

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.