“On Saturday morning during Storm Darragh, an incident occurred at Holyhead Port causing damage to port infrastructure,” the operators of the Welsh facility said last Sunday.
“As a result, Holyhead Port is currently closed to marine traffic and, at this time, it is expected that the port will remain closed until 18:00 Tuesday at the earliest.”
But services remained cancelled all week. Photographs and comment posted online indicated berthing infrastructure used by both Stena Line and Irish Ferries for their roll-on, roll-off ferry services between Dublin and Holyhead had been damaged at the height of the storm.
Normally, the two operators have ships sailing back and forth across the Irish Sea to the two ports, carrying not just passengers but a significant proportion of the freight that leaves and lands on the island of Ireland every day.
Because ships could not berth at Holyhead, ferries that normally go there couldn’t leave Dublin, meaning incoming ferries couldn’t dock there unless those there already temporarily took to sea to allow them to do so.
Two Stena ferries, Adventurer and Vision (which is out of service), spent part of the week sailing up and down the Irish coast, without passengers.
The Irish Ferries service between Dublin and France was accommodated by sailing the Ulysses out into Dublin Bay to make room for the WB Yeats when it arrived from Cherbourg.
But the key freight route between Dublin and Holyhead was closed, just before Christmas, one of the busiest times of the year for exporters and importers, not to mention the postal service. By Monday, there was already a 500,000 backlog of undelivered parcels stuck at the Welsh port, though by Thursday An Post was saying this had been reduced to 150,000 as hauliers switched to other sea routes.
“We are 29 years in business, and we have never seen anything like what is going on this week,” said Laurence O’Toole, managing director of O’Toole Transport, a family-owned Galway-based business with 180 trucks, 300 trailers, and depots in Dublin and the UK.
A major storm might disrupt traffic for 24 hours and leave a backlog, but the disruption this week found him struggling to find new ways to move product between Ireland and the UK.
“We have been trying to send our trucks up to Northern Ireland and ship them from Larne to Cairnryan [in Scotland], from Belfast to Cairnryan. We’ve gotten some movement and managed to get trucks moving.”
A lot of the product moved by his company is fresh foodstuffs for food companies and supermarkets, so delays are a real problem. Some customers reduced production because of the freighting problem, but not all could.
“One of our customers produces mushrooms. You can’t tell them to stop growing. They are going to keep growing every night and have to be picked every day, and be got over to the UK,” he said.
Trucks being sent to Belfast, he said, were being dealt with on a first-come, first-served basis, “but there are queues miles and miles long going into Belfast”.
Other trucks were heading to Rosslare Europort in Wexford, where the combination of the storm, when few ferries left any port on the island, and the closure of Holyhead, caused a spike in demand.
“We are taking the traffic, the limiting factor now is the capacity of the vessels,” said Glenn Carr, director of the port.
“We have offered extra sailings, where possible, and where it suits a shipping line. We haven’t had a request yet, but we have that capacity,” he said during the week.
[ Have Your Say: Has Holyhead Port damage delayed your Christmas present parcels?Opens in new window ]
By Thursday, Stena was using one of its ferries, the Astrid, which normally sails between Dublin and Holyhead, to carry freight to Birkenhead, near Liverpool.
The threat to foodstuffs, medicines and the Christmas retail trade were the major dangers raised by the closure of the Dublin-Holyhead freight route.
But those impacted included people with tickets for the opening night on Wednesday of the musical, Mary Poppins, at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin, which was cancelled.
“There have been repeated delays with large parts of the Mary Poppins set being shipped from the UK to Dublin,” the organisers said.
“The situation was further worsened by the subsequent closure of Holyhead, making it impossible to deliver the set on time.”
Tens of thousands of tonnes of freight are carried each month by the Irish Ferries and Stena routes between Dublin and Holyhead.
“There should have been a contingency plan in place long before now,” said Ger Hyland, president of the Irish Road Haulage Association. “Everyone is running around like headless chickens.”
The closure of the route in the run-up to Christmas, and as many eastern Europeans who drive Irish trucks are preparing to return home for their holidays, means “a lot of Christmas stuff is sitting on trailers”, he said.
“Every hour that this goes on is an hour less chance that they are going to be delivered before Christmas.”
He called on Taoiseach Simon Harris to intervene, “because we have a Transport Minister [Eamon Ryan] who has not been heard tell of and has not been seen.”
[ Christmas parcels destined for Ireland stuck in Holyhead Port due to storm damageOpens in new window ]
A spokesman for the Department of Transport said it was in constant contact with Dublin Port in relation to contingency planning to avoid or reduce the possibility of congestion.
“The Minister would like to underline his appreciation for the flexibility and resilience shown by the maritime and haulage sectors during this challenging period. It is reflective of the agility and determination demonstrated during both the Brexit and Covid-19 challenges.”
The crisis “just goes to show how dependent we are on one stand”, says O’Toole. “That’s the way the whole world has gone. Everything is up to the second, no room for error, the whole supply chain is designed for just in time and there is no margin.”
Ordinary storms causing 24 hours of disruption are a major problem but “as I said, I have never seen anything like this and I hope I don’t see anything like it again. But it is what it is, and we just have to get on with it.”
Holyhead is a critical infrastructure for the Irish export community but also for the UK, and its prolonged closure has the capacity to cause significant supply chain issues in the run-up to Christmas in both countries, said the chief executive of the Irish Exporters Association, Simon McKeever.
A spokesman for Dublin Port said what has happened this week “underlines the importance of having multiple routes and cargo types servicing Dublin Port”.
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