Ferry crisis 'will hit manufacturing jobs'

The grounding of four Irish Ferries ships could start hitting Irish manufacturing jobs within a fortnight, it was claimed today.

Several union leaders are meeting today to decide whether or not to hold a day of protest to pledge their support for workers at the company.

Irish Ferries and its staff have been locked in an increasingly bitter dispute since September over management plans to replace Irish workers with cheaper agency staff from overseas.

But the Irish Exporters Association (IEA) warned today that the manufacturing industry could start shedding jobs within a fortnight if the stand-off continues.

Hauliers say the dispute has the potential to cost the country millions of euro a day.

IEA chief executive John Whelan said loss of inward freight will start to run down some of the manufacturing facilities, depending on what buffer stock they had in place.

“It will probably run for about two weeks and the backlog situation will have become quite extensive at that stage,” he said.

“Unless other operators come into the Irish Sea, we will start seeing orders being lost at a fairly substantial rate and it wouldn’t be long before job cutbacks will then be necessary.”

The Irish Ferries fleet – comprising the Ulysses, the Isle of Inishmore, the MV Normandy and the Jonathan Swift – remains tied up in dock.

The IEA said the vulnerable Irish manufacturing sector had lost 30,000 jobs in the last two years.

“These companies are trying to hang on to markets. They are in a position where they will not be able to meet the sales demand and there are other competitors who are just waiting for the opportunity,” Mr Whelan said.

The executive council of the Congress of Trade Unions is also meeting today to consider its response to the latest developments in the dispute.

The controversy began in mid-September when Irish Ferries announced it was seeking 543 redundancies among its Irish workforce and intended to replace them with cheaper staff from overseas.

It reached crisis point last Thursday as members of SIPTU, the largest union in Ireland, barricaded themselves into the control room on the Isle of Inishmore after security personnel accompanied eastern European workers on board.

SIPTU members took over the bridge of the ferry, while crews of the Jonathan Swift in Dublin and the Ulysses in Holyhead have prevented their ships sailing for the past five days.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has urged staff, union representatives and management to exhaust all industrial relations avenues to resolve the long-running crisis.