Category Archives: Shannon

Eel update

Posted on Wednesday 7 May 2014 | Leave a comment

Dr William O’Connor says that no elver traps are operating on the River Shannon.

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Posted in Ashore, Built heritage, Canals, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Foreign parts, Industrial heritage, Ireland, Natural heritage, Operations, People, Politics, Sea, Shannon, shannon estuary, Sources, The fishing trade, waterways, Waterways management

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And then there were …? [updated]

Posted on Wednesday 7 May 2014 | 4 comments

IBRA and IMF

In the original version of this post, I wrote:

I don’t know whether the Irish Boat Rental Association [IBRA] still exists. I can’t find a website for it, although there are references to it, and information about it, on other websites. The online Eircom phone book doesn’t have an entry for it, although the Yelp directory has an address in Bray. This site may be IBRA’s, although I can’t find anything saying so. If you know the true position, do please let me know and I’ll amend this.

In a Comment, Steve Conlon said:

IBRA is most certainly alive and well. http://www.boatholidaysireland.com is IBRA’s portal site and the IBRA logo is prominently displayed on the top right hand corner of the page in question. IBRA members were also members of the Irish Marine Federation which explains the listing on their website. With regards to membership, this stands at 7 despite the current difficulties of Shannon Castle Line. Barrow Line Cruisers have recently joined as a full member of IBRA. The IBRA website and group brochure are currently being up dated and a new industry led study into the market for hire boats is being undertaken. IBRA is a member of ITIC, the Irish Tourist Industry Confederation. I hope that this clarifies.

And Sven Neubert said:

IBRA is still “alive and kickin’ ” and we do have regular meetings (next one in June). The webpage is indeed http://www.boatholidaysireland.com and the IBRA-logo can be clearly seen on it, in the top left corner.

But everything else you are saying on this subject is correct and the hire boat industry has suffered big time over the last number of years.

From my point of view this has been widely ignored by the powers to be. The industry may be too small, but some important people seem to forget, that we bring in many tourist every year, and a good share of them spend another while in the country. But that fact doesn’t appear in the statistics…

It is very sad to see the company of a colleague go, with Shannon Castle Line being one of the oldest IBRA members.

You can see my responses in the Comments.

Shannon Castle Line and Waveline

CarrickCraft and Waveline have announced today that they will be merging after the 2014 season [the same press release is on the two websites]. The combined fleet of 125 boats is to be based at the CarrickCraft bases.

And, according to InsolvencyJournal.ie, receivers have been appointed to Skyline Entertainment Ltd and to Twinross Holdings Ltd, two of the companies that have registered the business name Shannon Castle Line. On 11 April 2014 that business name was registered by DDL Marine Limited, a company whose application to register with the Companies Registration Office was lodged on 7 March 2014. For both Skyline and Twinross,

Brian McEnery of BDO was appointed Receiver and Manager by Bank of Scotland Plc on 30th April 2014.

[Update] The 7 May 2014 issue of Iris Oifigiúil covers the matter.

The shrinking of the Shannon hire business, to which I have often drawn attention on this site, seems to be continuing.

 

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Posted in Charles Wye Williams, Economic activities, Extant waterways, Ireland, Irish inland waterways vessels, Operations, People, Shannon, Sources, Tourism, Water sports activities, waterways, Waterways management

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Mineral Oil Tax returns for 2013

Posted on Thursday 1 May 2014 | 3 comments

I have been pointing out for many years that the Mineral Oil Tax is paid by only a tiny minority of Irish boat-owners, although it should be paid by all those who use rebated (green) diesel for propulsion of private pleasure craft. You can read my previous postings here, here, here and here, with information on how to pay, in 2014, the tax due for 2013 here.

Twelve months ago I gave the figures for the years 2009–2012.

In 2010, 38 boat-owners paid the tax for 2009.

In 2011, 41 boat-owners paid the tax for 2010.

In 2012, 22 boat-owners paid the tax for 2011. The total amount received was €53,398.58 on 141,503.29 litres of diesel, an average of 6432.1 litres per return; I reckoned that much of that figure was accounted for by the hire fleets.

In 2013, 23 boat-owners paid the tax for 2012. The total amount received was €113,841.45 on 301,674 litres of diesel. I was unable to explain the increase.

I now have the latest figures. In 2014, 20 boat-owners paid the tax for 2013. The amount received was €105,561.74 on 279,842.4  litres of diesel. This is the smallest number of returns since the idiotic tax was introduced.

I have suggested to the Revenue Commissioners that they should compare the reported total number of litres of diesel bought with the total sales reported by those Licensed Marked Fuel Traders who sell at marinas. The licensing system has been in operation since October 2012 so Revenue should be able to determine the total sales for 2013 and compare them with the reported purchases. The match is unlikely to be exact but the orders of magnitude would be interesting. If Revenue releases the figures to me I will report them here.

 

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Posted in Economic activities, Extant waterways, Ireland, Irish inland waterways vessels, Operations, Politics, Sea, Shannon, Sources, Tourism, Water sports activities, waterways, Waterways management

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Shannon Castle Line

Posted on Thursday 1 May 2014 | 1 comment

On 1 April 1976 the business name Shannon Castle Line was registered. Its address was Williamstown Harbour, Whitegate, Co Clare. The business number was 57837.

On 6 July 1999 a statement of particulars for the business name Shannon Castle Line was registered. The company Skyline Entertainment Limited had adopted the business name on 11 June 1999; its business was Hire of cruiser fleet.

On 25 April 2005 the business name Shannon Castle Line was registered by a company named Twinross Holdings Limited; its business was as a holding company. The company number was 299191.

On 11 April 2014 the business name Shannon Castle Line was registered by DDL Marine Limited, whose business is the renting of water transport equipment. DDL’s application to register was received by the Companies Registration Office on 7 March 2014.

All companies gave their address as Williamstown Harbour, [Whitegate,] Co Clare.

I am unable to reach the website of Shannon Castle Line, which is a member of the Irish Marine Federation.

There were once four cruiser hire firms on Lough Derg below Portumna Bridge, plus Emerald Star just above it.

 

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Posted in Charles Wye Williams, Economic activities, Extant waterways, Ireland, Irish inland waterways vessels, Operations, People, Shannon, Sources, Tourism, Water sports activities, waterways, Waterways management

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Shannon history

Posted on Monday 28 April 2014 | Leave a comment

The African Queen, formerly the first Shannon Princess, is up for sale.

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Posted in Economic activities, Extant waterways, Foreign parts, Ireland, Irish inland waterways vessels, Operations, Restoration and rebuilding, Scenery, Sea, Shannon, Tourism, waterways, Waterways management

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Shannon history in Birmingham

Posted on Monday 28 April 2014 | Leave a comment

According to the Railway & Canal Historical Society’s Events page, its annual Clinker Memorial Lecture, to be held in Birmingham in October 2014, will be about River Shannon steamers in the second quarter of the nineteenth century:

The 2014 Clinker Memorial Lecture will be held in Birmingham on the afternoon of Saturday 18th October 2014. The speaker will be Brian Goggin, BA (Mod), MA.

Brian graduated from Trinity College, Dublin in Economics and Politics, and spent some years as honorary Editor of the quarterly magazine of the Inland Waterways Association of Ireland. He and his wife Anne have been boating on Irish inland waterways since the late 1970s. He is currently working on a book on the Shannon steamers of the 1830s and 1840s, and the Clinker Lecture will draw on his research.

Before lunch (and independent of the Lecture) there will be a walking tour of central Birmingham, focusing on sites of waterway and railway interest.

 

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Posted in Charles Wye Williams, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Foreign parts, Industrial heritage, Ireland, Irish inland waterways vessels, Irish waterways general, Non-waterway, Operations, People, Politics, Rail, Scenery, Sea, Shannon, shannon estuary, Sources, Steamers, The cattle trade, Tourism, waterways, Waterways management

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Closing the Shannon in winter

Posted on Monday 7 April 2014 | Leave a comment

I pointed out some time ago that, in the Dáil on 16 October 2013, Jimmy Deenihan said:

The [budgetary] provision will enable Waterways Ireland to deliver on its core activities and targets, which include keeping the waterways open for navigation during the main boating season and promoting increased use of the waterways resource for recreational purposes.

That was the first time I noticed the suggestion that, in effect, boating in winter might be de-emphasised, as it were; the idea is followed up in the current draft of the Waterways Ireland Corporate Plan 2014–6. The proposal receives some support from the figures for Shannon traffic in the first three months of 2014.

I realise that, as the numbers are small, they can be affected by the high water levels, bad weather or the date of Easter, but those for 2014 are remarkably low. The totals for the first three months [Jan–Mar] since 2003 are:

2003  689
2004  536
2005 2229
2006  683
2007  825
2008 1449
2009  687
2010  567
2011  626
2012  736
2013  753
2014  260

All the usual caveats apply, notably that the figures do not capture boating that is confined to the lakes. Still, the 2014 figure is less than half the next lowest, and it’s the first time since 2003 that the figure has been below 500, 400 or 300.

 

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Posted in Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Ireland, Irish inland waterways vessels, Operations, Shannon, Sources, Tourism, Water sports activities, waterways, Waterways management, Weather

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Eels

Posted on Sunday 6 April 2014 | Leave a comment

An update here and, from across the water, here.

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Posted in Drainage, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Ireland, Operations, People, Politics, Sea, Shannon, shannon estuary, Sources, The fishing trade, waterways, Waterways management

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Important topics in Ireland 1845–1850

Posted on Saturday 5 April 2014 | Leave a comment

I thought it would be interesting to ask the British Newspaper Archive what people were reading about in newspapers published in Dublin between 1 January 1845 and 31 December 1850. The BNA has scans of two Dublin newspapers for that period, the Freeman’s Journal and the Dublin Evening Mail. I used the archive to search for four different words in those newspapers in that period; I then counted the numbers of results.

On the first round, I included ads and family notices.

Newspaper terms incl ads 1845–1850

Terms in Dublin newspapers (incl ads) 1845–1850

I guessed that the numbers for steam and railway might be exaggerated by their inclusion in ads so, on the second round, I excluded both ads and family notices. The result was as expected.

Newspaper terms excl ads 1845–1850

Terms in Dublin newspapers (excl ads) 1845–1850

I then asked Google’s Ngram machine to count the numbers of occurrences of four pairs of words between 1845 and 1850. I asked it to do a case-insentitive search, but it can’t do that for “compositions” (combinations of words), so it counted:

Ireland+potato
Ireland+steam
Ireland+famine
Ireland+railway.

Here is what it came up with, but whence I know not, other than that it searched the corpus English. The embedding process doesn’t seem to be working, so I’ve left the code here but also cut and pasted the output.

Google Ngram

Google Ngram

I suspect that, in recent times, the amount written about steam and railways of the period 1845–1850 in Ireland has been rather less than that about potatoes and the famine.

 

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Posted in Built heritage, Canals, Charles Wye Williams, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Foreign parts, Industrial heritage, Ireland, Irish inland waterways vessels, Operations, People, Rail, Sea, Shannon, Sources, Steamers, waterways

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The Mahmoudié Canal

Posted on Thursday 3 April 2014 | Leave a comment

There is a possible link between the Mahmoudié Canal, which ran from Alexandria to the Nile, and Irish waterways. I have not managed to establish a definite link to this Irish canal-boat but it is not ruled out either, and a few other Irish connections came up along the way: Oscar Wilde’s father, for instance, who wrote about the Boyne and the Corrib, and sent his most famous son to school on the Erne, travelled on the Mahmoudié Canal.

And did you know that, in the early 1840s, you could buy bottled Guinness and Bass in Cairo? Or that, to transport 50 people (including 12 ladies and 3 female servants) and 3 bags and 62 chests of mail across 84 miles of desert, you would have needed, in 1841,

  • 130 camel men, donkey men and servants
  • an escort of 17 Arab horsemen
  • 145 camels
  • 60 donkeys
  • 12 saddle horses
  • 12 carriage horses
  • 7 carriage camels
  • 12 donkey chairs: “for invalids, or ladies, the donkey-chair forms as easy a conveyance as a palanquin or sedan”
  • 3 two-wheeled carriages
  • 1 four-wheeled carriage?

Or that, to reduce the number of rats and insects on a cangia (sailing boat) on the Nile, you should sink it for two or three days before boarding?

You can read about all of that and more in this PDF. However, it’s not for the faint-hearted: it’s 51 pages, with over 300 endnotes (which you don’t have to read) and lots of links for those who are really interested. There are illustrations in some of the linked materials.

The Mahmoudié mystery v04 iwh [PDF]

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Posted in Ashore, Canals, Charles Wye Williams, Drainage, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Foreign parts, Forgotten navigations, Industrial heritage, Ireland, Irish inland waterways vessels, Natural heritage, Operations, People, Politics, Restoration and rebuilding, Scenery, Sea, Shannon, Sources, Steamers, Tourism, waterways, Waterways management

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