Out with the old, in with the new. As the outgoing Irish staff make way for the foreign contract staff on the Irish Ferries ship Ulysses, passengers and crew talk to Rosita Boland
The light is still struggling out of the sky when we arrive to board the 9.05am Irish Ferries ship sailing from Dublin Port to Holyhead. This boat, the Ulysses, which was the biggest car ferry in the world when it was built five years ago, sails continuously between Ireland and Wales. It is due to dock at Holyhead at 12.20pm.
Last month, the deal between the unions and Irish Ferries was hammered out in the Labour Relations Commission. Out of 543 crew members, 495 have chosen to take redundancy. The handover period for the incoming crew is under way, and so both old and new crew members are on board this sailing - 82 and 81 of them respectively. None of them know yet when the final handover date will be, but most crew will be replaced before the end of this month.
"It could be the last week for a lot of us," explains chief purser Thomas Fay. He is taking redundancy after spending all his working life at sea - 27 years. He started in B&I as a galley boy, washing pots and pans. His father also worked on the ferries. "The new crew are ghosting us. In the last 48 hours, we've been standing back and letting them get on with things, although if something isn't being done properly, we say so."
Have there been tensions between the outgoing and incoming crews?
"We are feeling very bad for the Irish crew. It is not nice for them or for us to work with each other," says bar supervisor Radoslaw Bielewicz (31), who is working in the Leopold Bloom bar. Bielewicz is from Gdansk in Poland, where his wife Margaretta and son Daniel (five) live. Prior to working for Cyprus-based recruitment firm Dobsons - which is now handling the Irish Ferries contract workers - Bielewicz worked for six years on an American cruise liner as a waiter. His wages were $50 (€41) a month. "We depended on tips for the rest. You never knew what you would get at the end of the cruise. Sometimes you got only an empty envelope from a passenger."
BIELEWICZ WORKED BETWEEN eight and nine months at a stretch before having a month off, so the Irish Ferries proposal of working two months on and a month off, with easier access to home, is, he says, a much better arrangement for him. "For six years, I missed Christmas, New Year and Easter in Poland. Now I will get back home after every two months." He looks around the Leopold Bloom bar and suddenly smiles. "This is my kingdom!"
It's pretty quiet on board for the outward journey, with only 138 passengers. Total capacity is 2,000. There is a bit of a swell, and some passengers are taking advantage of the extra space and lying down on couches. Passenger Dermot Nolan is sitting at the far side of the Leopold Bloom bar, reading the paper. He's taking his daughter back to university in Manchester, and the car is full of her belongings for her student accommodation.
"Sadness is my first instinct for what's happened at Irish Ferries," he says. "In order to compete, you have to go to the lower side of the market. I'm not denigrating, but that's the bottom line. It's just a token name now, Irish Ferries. It has lost any Irishness. They'll probably change the name, too, in a while, and it'll be just another anonymous international company. For a lot of these men, working at sea was like working at Guinness, you followed your Da into the business. It was probably a closed shop, working at sea, and now it's an open market. But it keeps the show afloat - employ non-nationals because you can now pay them less. For me, the real sadness about the whole thing is that the decision was made by accountants."
Derek Robinson is originally from Grimsby and has a house in Ireland. He looks up from his Sudoku puzzle. "I've been a regular traveller to Ireland over the years, and I'm a bit dismayed with the changes. I always travelled Irish Ferries because of the Irish connection, but all that will be gone now."
Many of the incoming crew are wearing identity tags marked "Contractor". One such young woman is cleaning tables. Would she like to talk to me? Once she hears the word "journalist", she looks deeply distressed. "No," she whispers, looking at the floor, clutching her cloth and bottle of cleaning fluid. I ask why. There is no reply. She backs away, and then literally runs away from me.
It's the same when I approach another young woman who is polishing a chrome railing. She freezes at the J-word. This time, I point out that the deal with the unions is done; that I'm not here to talk about that; it doesn't make any difference. "I can't talk to you," she says.
"Has someone told you not to talk to journalists?"
"Yes."
"Who?"
"Please, I cannot tell you. Please, leave me alone." There is fear in her face. She also quickly moves away from me.
"They've picked up that people don't want us here. That's probably why they won't talk to you," suggests Scottish purser Paula McDougall, who is in charge of the incoming crew. "If they've been told not to talk to journalists, the order hasn't come from us," chief purser Fay insists.
Whatever the reasons, it's noticeable that it's the workers at the bottom of the recruitment ladder - the cleaners - who all say No to interviews in the course of the day.
PASSENGERS BRIAN ROCHE and Martin Keane, both from Glenamaddy in Co Galway, have been home for New Year. They're sitting over takeaway cups of tea, by a table near the window, looking out at the choppy Irish Sea. They have been living in England - in London and Reading - for 40 years and have regularly travelled as passengers on the boat. They are not happy at the prospect of an all-new crew the next time they make this journey.
"If you ask those gubbins for a cup of tea, they wouldn't know what you were saying," Keane snorts. "They can't understand what we're saying. Of course I'd prefer to see my own people working on the ship, wouldn't everybody?"
"The Irish people were forced out of their jobs," Roche states flatly. "There should have been some other way of working it out. It's slave labour here now, isn't it? We're going back in time and running slave ships."
We reach Holyhead and the boat docks. It's the quiet period on board - the passengers from the 9.05am sailing have disembarked and boarding for the 3pm sailing is yet to start.
Purser Gerald McCarthy has been with Irish Ferries for 32 years. He started off as a steward. Like many others, he's taking the package. "It's like this," McCarthy says. "In the past, when someone left Irish Ferries, it was like they left the club. You'd make plans to see people again, but you rarely did. When we're working, we live on board: this route is a week on and a week off. Most ordinary workers go home at five from their workplaces, but we spent as much time with each other as we did with our families. So when you left Irish Ferries - or B&I as it used to be - it was like you were leaving the club, but the club survived. Now the club itself will disintegrate."
McCarthy, like many of his colleagues, knows all the regular passengers, such as the truck drivers. He's also seen a generation of students working on board at their summer jobs, cleaning, doing bar work and working in the duty free. Many of them later returned with their families. "And others. I'd know their faces from over the years. We all would." Listening to McCarthy, it's clear that there are many stories within this one crew, a chunk of untold social history of a working life at sea that everyone, including the workers, took for granted.
"That collective experience and knowledge of passengers comes with time. It'll all go with the changeover. It's nobody's fault, it's just the way it is." McCarthy looks around him and laughs. "It's the full circle come round again. I went to England for my first job, to do a job nobody wanted to do - to work on the buildings. It was a step up to come and work here. Now working on the ferries has become the job nobody else wants to do."
SINCE THE DEAL was struck at the LRC, one of main points of the agreement is that incoming workers must be paid at least the Irish minimum wage. For many of the contract workers, this means they will now be paid twice what they originally thought they would be getting.
"I will only believe this when I see the money in my account," says Inese Kosevhjh (27) who is from Riga in Latvia. "If it is true, it is very good news, but I do not yet believe it. None of us do." She has been training on Ulysses for four weeks, and will be working as a receptionist, on a two months on, one month off contract. She has two children at home in Riga, Daniel (five) and Darjana (three). Since her husband is also working abroad, their children are minded most of the time by what what Kosevhjh calls "a babysitter".
"It wasn't very comfortable at the beginning for us, working with the Irish crew," she says.
The contract workers on the Ulysses are Polish, Estonian and Lithuanian, but the majority - about two thirds - are Latvian. The Irish Ferries dispute accordingly made a big splash in the Latvian media, and Kosevhjh's parents were extremely worried about their daughter, calling her often to try to find out more about the dispute and what was going to happen to her new job.
Adam Paczoska and Krzystof Gadomski are both chief officers, from Poland. "At the beginning the atmosphere was not so good," Paczoska says. "I was ready to go home."
"It was not a comfortable situation for us," says Gadomski. "Some Irish crew are very friendly and some are very fed-up. You know, the thing is that the money we are getting is not as good in Poland as people think. There is very, very high unemployment there, but everything costs a lot now. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have much smaller populations. They will become successful much faster than Poland as a result."
The ship is boarded, turns around and begins its journey back to Dublin. There are 281 passengers on this run.
Bernadette Westwood, who lives in Co Monaghan, travels the Holyhead route twice a year with her family to visit relatives in Birmingham. "We shouldn't have these foreign workers on this ferry. Is it true they don't even live in Ireland in their time off, that they go home? That's disgusting. It means that the money they're being paid is going out of the country. They are taking the jobs and then giving nothing back to the country - I think it's disgusting."
Would she consider travelling with a different ferry company in the future as a result? She thinks. Before she can answer, her husband Robert replies: "We'll go with whoever is cheapest. Isn't that what it's all about?"