Is Rosslair heading for Davy Jones's Locker?

Over 10 years ago I started blogging. The very first topic I covered on cllrjoeryan.blogspot.com was Rosslare Europort and its future.  I’ve a back ground in   The failure to invest in Rosslare and see its potential is one. Why? Because it still persists. Long after ports like Folkestone, Stranraer and Dun Laoghaire have seen an end to passenger services, Rosslare survives despite the policy makers. The new consensus in business is critical mass. Rosslare comes a poor second behind Cork and Dublin ports. These ports can offer operators like Irish Ferries better rates. The potential loss on shipping to Britain after Brexit will be replaced by European shipping. That was clear to me when I stood in Croke Park last April and saw a massive container ship which is billed as the Brexit buster. It will sail 3 times a week to and from Belgium carrying containers that otherwise would have gone through the landbridge to EU markets.

transport from my time managing a student travel business in my 20’s. A lot has changed since then but much remains the same.

It is the exact same logic that sees McCauleys want to relocate from Wexford to Dublin. It is the same policy that sees Dublin recently get a fourth university when we still have no university in the south east. While government may want for optics to be seen to fight Wexford’s corner, how many will be fooled?

And nobody knows any of this better than Pascal O’Donohue and Leo Varadkar both the immediate predecessors of Shane Ross in the Department of Transport who went on to better things. Both had the opportunity to deal with some of the issues I raised in that blog like the spending of €1M to remove rail access and the failure to develop rail freight.

I’ve concluded that neither Varadkar nor Donohue never acted because it is simply ideological on their part. They pretend otherwise but their implicit policy is to let the market sort it out. Logistics is no place for policy.  Ross was the guy who hollered about waste in CIE in opposition. In fact he co wrote with his son in law (How more Healey Rae can one get in South Dublin?) a book about corporate shenanigans called “Wasters”. 

Let’s be blunt about it. Dublin has the M50 and port tunnel with a very efficient harbour which can offer low berthing fees based on economies of scale. Look at a map, all roads lead to Dublin. An extra few hours on board a luxury ship will extract more money from Irish Ferries passengers. Sailing from Dublin means less driving for many of their car passengers. Trucks may be a different story all together. It will add to costs from the south east but other parts of the country will see cost and time reductions. The new Irish Ferries ship will see additional capacity. It is that additional capacity which will make it very difficult for any new shipping line to come on the route from Rosslare to France.

Except, there is the matter of the Enniscorthy and New Ross by passes which are set to open in 2019. Rather than making it easy to get to Rosslare, could it be that they make it easier for trucks to distribute from Cork or Dublin ports?

So while Fine Gael may tug at the company directors sleeve to ask them to reconsider, Irish Ferries know the score. They didn’t do U turns on the issue of reflagging and yellow packing with agency staff over 15 years ago, they won’t be doing it now either.

If Rosslare Europort has a future it will be when the ideological hang up in the present government is put away and not until then. In essence the last 3 ministers created the environment where Irish Ferries could take the decision to pull its continental services and get away with it knowing there’d be nothing that could be done once it walked. Much has been made of €15M to be allocated to Rosslare Europort over the next 7 years. Compare that to almost €1B for Dublin port. Makes you wonder who the constituency TD for Dublin Port is, doesn’t it, Pascal?

The sooner Wexford wakes up to that reality, the better.

Selected!

I’ve been here before and I’m back again. It brought back a memory of one night when I was a young student in 1982. I told my mother I wouldn’t be home til late. I would be at a selection conference for Ruairi Quinn. She told me someday I’d be going to my own selection conference. How right she is!

And so it is that Labour selected its team for Wexford District for the local elections in 2019. Maura Bell, George Lawlor and myself will be on the stump for the next 5 months.  The news that there will be no general election before 2020 will focus minds on the local and European elections as well as the referenda next May.

Maura will bring a lot to the team. She has a track record second to none in developing the tourist product in Wexford. She’s practical, down to earth a straight talker and straight thinker who will go down well on the doorsteps. There’s little more that even I can add to what’s been said about George already except this. If Wexford di  that not even NASA could build a satellite to reach us.

dn’t have George as its councillor and Mayor in the last 5 years, we’d have been so far up the swannee

Last time round was a bruising experience for me.  My first preference vote was well down on expectations but strong transfers saw me pick up and challenge at the end. Politics is not all about elections. It’s about the people who you want to serve. Elections are but one part of a bigger picture that is neither about winning or losing but it’s about counting. And it’s people who count, not votes.

The reality is that in the last 4 years those councillors who set out to win the debate in 2014 with simple populist slogans delivered very little for all their time on the council. There’s been no advance for Wexford’s hopes of a university college since Labour left office 3 years ago, no development of the harbour and nothing done about bringing new jobs to Wexford.  National issues were used to win seats at local level by candidates who delivered precious little subsequently at local level.

Since the amalgamation of the Chambers of Commerce, there is no advocate for business in the town. I threw my eyes to heaven when I heard that the Co Wexford Chamber are now pitching to McCauleys to move their HQ from Wexford to Gorey as an alternative to Dublin. Where is the opposition to that suggestion? Councillors who were mighty mouse at the last local election on issues about unemployment and marginalisation are now as quiet as church mice when it comes to defending the interest of jobs in Wexford.

It’s time to roar back at the lazy and lethargic  local councillors who’ve turned their backs on what they themselves identified as what was wrong. Politics isn’t about elections, it’s about people, it’s about people all the time not just election time.

Bring it on! I think Ruairi would approve.

Getting hot about climate change at Labour Youth Conference.

Labour Youth are holding their annual conference in Wexford. There’s about 60 or more of them in Whites Hotel from all parts of Ireland. Last night also saw a Mick Wallace public meeting in the same hotel. The official line there was that Mick’s numbers didn’t match expectation. That’s how you alliterate the number 10 these days.

This morning I put the head around the door to listen to the debate on Climate Change.  There are a number of motions on the topic of nuclear power and alternatives for offshore islands. They spoke about if Ireland wanted to build a nuclear power plant within spitting distance of the only location where it was originally proposed by Des O’Malley that Ireland would join the nuclear club.

Almost 40 years ago we baulked. The reality is that there is now a pressing need to reduce CO2 emission worldwide. Renewables are problematic when it comes to availability and tidal locations may be off limits due to environmental restrictions while the alternatives of wave hasn’t been moved past the experimental stage.

Now however our energy demand is greater, there is an All -Ireland energy market with the state connected to the European and British grid. In reality economically converting to nuclear would mean that we’d need a number of nuclear power plants so that when one station was off line due to maintenance the rest would pick up the slack. That means there’d be over capacity in the system, because at the same time there would remain on the system power stations already operating.

Ireland needs energy security. Should we rely on other countries to provide energy on a day to day basis? Ireland’s problem is that we need energy but we also need to comply with carbon emissions. However, if only our emissions were solely from energy production, they aren’t.

Transport, construction and agriculture in Ireland contribute to our emissions. The emphasis on reduction just doesn’t apply to me as a consumer of power. They apply to farmers, builders as well as Ryanair and your local trucker. But as was pointed out by one speaker, the increase in global temperatures past 2C is a given. 2C means 2C beyond where it is today. What we already have in this planet is causing climate change today.

Now, as one speaker pointed out, it seems that we’re not even going to stop at today plus 2C. 

And here’s the rub. Climate change can be tackled best by the countries that are richer. I visited Zambia in 2017. They rely on hydro electricity to power their economy. However in 2016, rainfall levels dropped so less power could be generated. Ireland however rolled on regardless. We are according to Leo Varadkar who can actually do something about this, environmental laggards. Countries like Zambia won’t have the ability that Ireland has to adapt.Climate change is climate injustice it loads the dice further against undeveloped countries.

In short we are behaving selfishly. Others will pay for our profligacy while we potter on. Soon we will be past asking how to limit the increase, the debate must switch to how CO2 can be taken out of the atmosphere so as to reverse the worst of what is yet to come.

There’s an old story about Michael D. At one hot and heavy Labour meeting his absence was excused on the basis that he was stuck in Rio waiting for a connecting flight home. “Yes” said Frank Cluskey,”that’s our Michael. Faced with the difficulty of saving the world and saving the Labour Party, Michael picks the easy option”.

Perhaps instead,  he might have been ahead of the curve? Fair play to Labour Youth  members for focusing on climate change, Not for the first time will one generation have to clean up a previous generation's mess.