“Its been a disaster.”
That is how Managing Director of BM Transport Darren Murphy has described the week since Holyhead Port in Wales closed due to storm damage last weekend.
“We’re used to dealing with storms in the Irish Sea, we’re used to boats being cancelled, or a boat breaking down, but this is just totally unprecedented,” Mr Murphy said.
“We have a depot in Holyhead, 60 to 65% of our traffic would have moved through Holyhead,” Mr Murphy explained from the office of BM Transport’s depot in Monaghan.
He currently has 80 trailers stranded in the Welsh port.
“Customers were very understanding, they’ve seen it on the news, but it is delaying projects,” Mr Murphy said.
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“We have a wide range of goods in Holyhead, white goods, breakfast cereals, building products for building sites, that is going to delay those projects, and it’s going to have a knock-on effect and realistically some of them are not going to move until after Christmas looking at the way it is now,” he said.
BM Transport would also use Liverpool port in England and Cairnryan port in Scotland to transport goods to Ireland, and it has switched as many of its shipments as it can from Holyhead to these ports.
However, Mr Murphy said increased demand at these ports has caused problems too.
“In most cases this week we’ve had to send them to Cairnryan and Cairnryan is experiencing 14-15 hours of delays” Mr Murphy said.
“They are stacking the trucks on a disused airfield with no facilities, except maybe a Portaloo, for the drivers who have to sit in the airfield all that time, and then they’re bringing them in in tranches when the boats are actually free to take them,” Mr Murphy said.
Many drivers working in the Irish haulage industry are from eastern Europe and they would usually travel home for Christmas around this time in December.
“We had drivers this week who were due to fly home on their holidays on Friday night. They were in Cairnryan on Thursday morning, they didn’t get home in time and they missed their flights and they had to book more flights this weekend at a more expensive cost,” Mr Murphy said.
“So then you have your drivers this week who are starting to panic, which is totally understandable, they need to get home, and the drivers you want to send out don’t want to go because they’re afraid that they’re not getting home. So its a catch-22, its just a nightmare.”
Then there is the issue of customs checks.
Mr Murphy explained that whenever customs clearance on a container is filled out in advance, it must state which port a container is being shipped to, and this poses a problem when a haulier changes the destination.
Naturally, that happened a lot last week, and will again this week while Holyhead remains closed and alternative routes are used.
For example, where a load was originally due to travel from Holyhead in Wales to Dublin, it may now be transported from Cairnryan in Scotland to Larne or Belfast in Northern Ireland.
“They would get off the ferry at Larne or Belfast and have to drive the whole way to Dublin to close the customs transit in the customs yard in Dublin Port, and then they have to turn around a drive to Monaghan, so you can imagine the cost and the time,” Mr Murphy said.
Last night the Government agreed to a temporary relaxation of rules applying to hauliers to allow drivers to drive for longer and to take shorter breaks in the run-up to Christmas, but this only applies within the Republic of Ireland.
While Mr Murphy welcomed the derogation he believes it will do little to ease the pressure, as the rules have not changed in the UK or in Europe.
“The big problem, where you are having the extra mileage and the extra hours is in the UK,” Mr Murphy said.
“Plus even when you have the derogation, drivers have issues, they don’t want to go over their tachograph cards (which contain data on their driving hours and rest times) and then get stopped maybe in France or Germany, its very hard to explain this to the authorities and not get a fine,” he said.
Mr Murphy believes this week will be even busier “once passenger traffic starts to flow” ahead of Christmas, especially if Holyhead does not reopen on Thursday.
“Holyhead is jammed for the five or six days before Christmas Eve every year, so where is that traffic going to go?”, he added.