The schooner Grace O’Malley which was purchased by private investors with plans to develop it as Ireland’s new national sail training ship has been sold.
The Sunday Independent reports that the Atlantic Youth Trust, the not-for-profit charity set up to run the project, was unable to attract State funding.
The newspaper quotes Atlantic Youth Trust chairman Enda O’Coineen as confirming that the ship had been sold for “a not insignificant loss” to a private Dutch buyer who plans to circumnavigate the globe.
The ship, a three-masted Tradewind schooner, was built in Sweden in 1982 and is made of submarine steel with a teak black superstructure.
It was reportedly bought by the Atlantic Youth Trust for €2.5 million from donations. It was listed under its previous name “Lady Ellen” for sale last summer.
“It’s a very beautiful ship and the replacement cost today would be in excess of €15m,” he told the newspaper.
“The benefits were across tourism, youth development, helping to train young people for the future development of offshore renewables, marine development, transport – there’s a strong north-south element,”he said.
O’Coineen told the newspaper it was “massively disappointing”, and said that some of the 35 individuals who supported it are “rolling forward their support into operating two smaller vessels”, while others are “being given their money back”.
He said that the project failed to get the “anchor partner” it needed in government to secure the funding from the Exchequer, estimated at around 1 million euro a year to run.
He confirmed that the project then applied for support through the Irish Immigrant Investor Programme, the so-called “Golden Visa” scheme which ran for over a decade and was closed to new applications in February 2024.
“We had 14, mainly Chinese, investors who had agreed to put in money. We got to the final stage of that,” O’Coineen said, but he said the Department of Justice rejected the application.
Read The Sunday Independent here
