Menu

Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

Displaying items by tag: Support UK Gov

The Minister for Transport, Eamon Ryan has said he would support any new measures taken by the UK government to raise wages on Irish Sea ferries in response to the P&O controversy.

British transport secretary Grant Shapps has signalled that he wants to create “minimum wage corridors” between the UK and its main trading partners Ireland, France and Denmark to overhaul international maritime law so that ferry operators pay better wages to crew members.

His plans come in response to P&O’s mass sacking of 800 crew members without consultation, replacing them with agency staff paid about 40 per cent less than the UK minimum wage.

Asked whether the Government would support Mr Shapps’s proposals on Irish Sea routes, Mr Ryan said: “What happened in P&O Ferries in my mind was outrageous in terms of the shift towards cheaper wages as a solution to problems we have in the energy and transport sector.” He added “If the UK government was looking at a more just approach to wage levels in that sector, I would be supportive,”

A spokeswoman for the Minister confirmed that Mr Shapps had written to Mr Ryan about extending employee rights for seafarers with regard to the national minimum wage.

More from The Irish Times on response from this side of the Irish Sea over the ongoing ferry dispute. 

Published in Ferry

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.