A Co Monaghan haulage company has described the closure of Holyhead as '"totally unprecedented." Darren Murphy who is the Managing Director of BM Transport has 80 trailers stranded in the Welsh port. According to Darren, the company is used to dealing with storms in the Irish Sea, boats being cancelled, or a boat breaking down, but this is just "totally unprecedented."
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 told Northern Sound that increased demand at these ports has caused problems too. Darren explained; "This issue highlights to everybody how dependent we are on Holyhead. There's no one port in the rest of the UK that carries the same volume of traffic that Holyhead does, so with no alternative we need to look at that when this is all over."
Junior Transport Minister James Lawless met with the Welsh Cabinet Secretary for Transport yesterday to assess the backlog of shipping containers stuck at the port, which closed due to damage cause by Storm Darragh. The port was first estimated to reopen this Thursday, with alternative travel routes recommended to ferry passengers in the meantime. Despite this, Darren says he "isn't holding out much hope" for the reopening to took place this Thursday. "The concern would be the passenger traffic," he explained. "Once Thursday comes typically the A55 in Holyhead would be completely jammed with people coming home for Christmas. Freights would usually be dropped in favour of passenger traffic which is understandable by the ferry companies but I don't know where all that freight is going to go. We currently have drivers in Cairnryan and they are sitting anywhere up to 15 hours in a disused airfield waiting to get into the docks to actually get onto the boat."
