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Displaying items by tag: Strike

Halloween decorations, DIY materials and heavy machinery deliveries bound for Ireland could face delays as a two-week dockers’ strike at the port of Liverpool gets underway.

At least 560 workers were due to walk out of the port last night in a dispute over pay, according to the Unite trade union, just hours after Queen Elizabeth’s funeral and the end of a 10-day national mourning period.

The strike will affect the Port of Liverpool’s container division until October 3, although other operations – cruises, trailer traffic and bulk cargo – will be unaffected, the port said in a statement.

Although Liverpool does not handle time-sensitive food or other perishable goods bound for Ireland, it is a hub for goods coming in via container ship from Asia and the United States including goods destined for Irish retailers.

“Any disruption in England has a knock-on impact for Ireland,” said Aidan Flynn, chief executive of the Freight Transport Association of Ireland. “It’s like a concertina effect. Things get squeezed.” 

Independent.ie has more here on the strike on Merseyside. 

Published in Ports & Shipping

#FERRY NEWS - Industrial action by French crews with Brittany Ferries is still disrupting the company's ferry services from Cork to Roscoff.

As previously reported on Afloat.ie, a series of wildcat strikes by staff protesting against changes to their working terms and conditions began last Friday 21 September.

The action led to the cancellation of sailings on the weekend-only round-trip Cork route until further notice.

Passengers intending to travel from Cork have been advised to seek passage instead on Celtic Ferries' Rosslare-to-Cherbourg route or Irish Ferries' Rosslare services to Cherbourg.

Published in Brittany Ferries

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.