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Displaying items by tag: Stormont Agreement

#TallShips - The Atlantic Youth Trust has hailed its inclusion in the new implementation plan for the Stormont Agreement announced yesterday.

As RTÉ News reports, Northern Ireland's power-sharing administration finally struck a deal yesterday (Tuesday 17 November) after more than two months of negotiations.

And according to the trust's Neil O'Hagan, the sail training initiative is "the only the only independent charitable project included in both this agreement and the Irish Government's Capital Investment Plan.

"This secures our future and most importantly our ability to deliver youth development, peace-building and maritime education voyages for generations to come. In the coming weeks we will be working with both administrations to determine timelines," he added.

The Atlantic Youth Trust has proposed the construction of a new tall ship as a replacement for the Asgard II to bring young people from both sides of the border together for sail training voyages.

O'Hagan said the inclusion of the project "in a historic document such as this does not come easily and would not be possible without the support and guidance of our stakeholders.

"We would like to once again thank everyone involved in getting us to this point and look forward to working with you all over the coming years."

Published in Tall Ships

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.