On a squally day in Dublin bay, gardaí park up on the Great South Wall, placing their car and authority in front of the walkers who come to the wall to watch waves dominate it. 

At high tide and in high winds, the wall, which culminates in the Poolbeg Lighthouse,  becomes dangerous as parts of it are submerged and impassable. 

Beloved by Dubliners as the improbable pathway from the middle of the bay to the chimney stack gateposts of the city, it’s been a capital feature for close to three centuries.

Built out of necessity for sailors and seafarers, who needed safe harbour and waters deep enough to dock in Dublin, the sea wall was first, disastrously, constructed with wooden piling in the mid-1700s. 

When it became apparent that it needed to be constructed from stone, it was both a feat of engineering and a capital investment that Dublin and Ireland have reaped benefit from since, but its future is far from guaranteed.

The sea level is expected to rise 1.3 metres by 2100 and the wall, which is a protected structure, will be submerged beyond use. 

If nothing is done, Dublin’s port will return to the same silted, sandy form that it held hundreds of years ago, making constant dredging a necessity, or more likely making it close to redundant.

To rework it will require tens of millions of euro and years of work, and as yet there is still no firm plan in place for what will be done to save the wall, though a consultation between the OPW, Dublin County Council, Dublin Port Authority and the public is expected to open by the end of this year. 

For other companies or bodies, planning 80 years in advance may seem like tempting fate. For Dublin Port, whose history stretches back to the construction of earthen banks at Wood Quay in 900 BC, anything else would be myopic. 

Over centuries, the port has been pushed further and further down the river, as the construction of static bridges has made it impassable to ships. Yet remnants of its heritage still lie along the quays, in the hefty boat hooks left along the Liffey’s walls.

Now occupying 640 acres at the very brink of the bay, on refilled and once swampy land, it is a place of heavy industry and bracken water, sitting in the spot where, “the dark rich river, full of strange time, dark time, strange tragic time is flowing, flowing out to sea” as Thomas Wolfe wrote of it in 1947.

Along with the heritage it carries, the port is also the present-day receptacle for many of the big geopolitical and economic stories in the world right now. 

Controversial Russian oil, the cost of shipping, logjams that are coiling up supply chains around the world, the climate crisis, globalised labour, human migration and the Irish housing crisis – all of this is reflected in the workings and decisions of Dublin Port Authority. 

At the top of it all, from a fourth-floor office in the port’s brutalist headquarters on North Dock, is Eamonn O’Reilly, the chief executive of the self-financing semi-state company for the past dozen years, and the architect behind the Dublin Port Masterplan 2040. 

A €1.6 billion plan, it seeks to build out the port to its ultimate capacity of handling 77 million tonnes a year, and to keep pace with its projected annual growth of 3.3 per cent up to 2040. 

What happens after 2040 is still unknown. If the rate of growth continues at pace, then a second port, DP2.0, could need to be constructed on the east coast.

Dublin Port estimates that this second port would need to have capacity to handle 134 million tonnes per annum, if growth was to slow to 1.5 per cent between  2040 and 2080. 

For now, Dublin Port is hoping that a second port won’t need to be built as the costs are eye-watering, and cargo could instead be managed through existing ports along the east coast. 

Over his 12-year tenure, which will finish at the end of August, O’Reilly has faced both positive and negative publicity as CEO of the port. 

A slew of stories about his credit card spending and that of other Dublin Port management drew ire from the public in 2018, stories which he now calls a “very pointed and personal attack from The Sunday Independent.” 

The same year, he successfully took a case against his employer to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC), challenging the seven-year term limit for CEOs of semi-state bodies. 

“I found it quite extraordinary that they were trying to impose a limit on my employment rights, in contravention of European law, as a matter of government policy,” he comments now. As well as receiving a Contract of Indefinite Duration status, the WRC awarded him €45,000 in compensation.

In recent months, as the calls for Dublin Port to be relocated elsewhere became news for a few days, O’Reilly was back in the public eye, as he defended the 640 acres of port lands that property developers, most prominently Harry Crosbie and Johnny Ronan, have been making very public approaches at. 

The calls to move Dublin Port, whose promised lands are in O’Reilly’s words “a magnet for daft notions and opportunism”, first began in 1990, but have a new edge to them as the housing supply crisis continues and 50,000 homes could potentially be built on the vast site.

According to the Port Authority’s own projections, it would take close to €9 billion and twenty years to move the port from its current position and for the land to be ready for any developer “to have at it,” as O’Reilly says. 

“There was an extraordinary amount of lobbying.”

The likelihood of Dublin Port actually moving to the deep water at Bremore, in North Dublin, or another location on the east coast seems slim, but what O’Reilly believes is happening is an attempt to get chunks of the Port’s lands, which extend across both the north and south of the Liffey, put up for sale. 

“It’s just throwing a stone into the pond and seeing what happens. They’re hoping the government will say; that’s a great idea and in the meantime, sell some port land so that they can do some developments, without actually caring whether a new port ever gets built.

“Ronan Group Real Estate has a submission into Dublin City Development Plan, and their planner John Spain says the Dublin Port Masterplan should be thrown out. 

“They say the Port can be moved up to Bremore, and, lo and behold, there are loads of Port lands right beside the Irish Glass Bottle site where Ronan Group have planning permission to build homes.”

The proposed multibillion-euro development at Bremore is a joint venture between Drogheda Port Company and the Ronan Group, a fact which O’Reilly points out when talking about the “extraordinary amount” of lobbying the Ronan Group carries out on elected politicians. 

“Ronan Group has an interest in lands on the Poolbeg Peninsula. A couple of years back, there was a proposal to build Dublin Bay studios on Poolbeg peninsula, which was a real eye-opener for me on the way that that development can work,” O’Reilly said.

“There was an extraordinary amount of lobbying, I did an analysis over two years and there were nine government ministers lobbied, and if you were a Dublin city councillor and you weren’t lobbied, you were probably in the minority.

“I may be a bit naive, but I was shocked by it.”

The calls to move the port were also backed up this time around, by the Dublin Docklands Business Forum, which made a submission to the city council as officials work on a new 2022-2028 draft development plan, outlining why the port should be moved in order to accommodate thousands of workers around the docklands area.

The Docklands Business Forum says it is a representative body comprising 200 local companies including multinationals like Google and Accenture, who both have members on the forum’s steering committee. 

O’Reilly has previously rebuffed the Business Forum as an organisation he will engage with on the subject of relocating the port, and says now: “I think there was some misleading coverage of the call as if Dublin Docklands business Forum represented huge companies like Google or Accenture or PwC, or A&L Goodbody and it doesn’t.”

When contacted by The Currency, a representative for Google said they weren’t currently affiliated with the Forum and had no position on the Dublin Port being moved. A spokesman for Accenture said: “Accenture is not a formal member of the organisation and cannot comment on the Docklands Business Forum’s planning submission.”

In an emailed response a spokesperson for the forum told The Currency: “The views expressed in the submission are those of the collective organisation and it would not be correct to ascribe them to any individual business. We simply wish to start a legitimate conversation around the future of the city.”

The flurry of noise around the port being moved has gone silent for now, but it’s unlikely to have gone away for good and in the meantime. O’Reilly is continuing to plough on with the 2040 masterplan.

Price rises and backlash

To fund the plan’s projects, developing berths and extending further, Dublin Port raised its prices for the first time since 1997 and these came into effect on April 1 this year.

Across the board, prices will increase 2.5 per cent each year for the next five years. 

The port is also slowly progressing to make the cost of moving empty containers the same as the cost of occupied ones. Traditionally, they were a fraction of the price, a move that O’Reilly admits has faced backlash. 

But it won’t be the end of it. It is likely that less than a year after the five-year plan for price increases was announced, they will be revised and increased again by Christmas. 

“Nobody likes price increases. When we did the consultation, we got some feedback and we made some changes but people have to pay for the infrastructure that they use, even if they’re used to not paying as much as they should be,” said O’Reilly.

“It is extraordinary, since September, when we published the first document, the world has changed. 

“I think it is more likely than not we will be revising, towards the end of this year, the five-year plan. 

“It is more likely than not that the view will be that the increases in the future years will need to be higher than we had thought last December. 

“The world is changing so rapidly. And I’d be lying if I said otherwise.

“We have huge demands for pay increases, and there is a real danger we get into an inflationary spiral similar to the 1980s. We definitely have inflation in construction we can see and we spend an awful lot on construction. So there’s an awful lot of uncertainty.”

While the shipping companies face higher prices at the port, it is a fraction of the larger shipping industry story.

“What’s happening in the international container shipping industry is that there is an enormous dislocation,” O’Reilly said.

“Normally goods come out of China and in laden containers and empty containers go back to China. 

“But because of Covid, an awful lot of the goods going into, particularly, the west coast of the States, they weren’t moving out to the ports. Therefore the containers weren’t getting emptied, therefore there were no empty containers in the Far East. therefore the price of containers coming out of the Far East went up. 

“And you’ve had this whole supply chain operation that has been enormously disrupted and the shipping industry is taking the opportunity to greatly increase its prices. In many cases, four-fold and fivefold over containers from the Far East into Europe and the States. And you just look at the profits they’re making, they’re extravagant.”

O’ Reilly doesn’t see this logjam and disruption to the shipping industry changing anytime soon but rather unwinding over months and months. “The deep-sea lines are taking the opportunity to enjoy very high charges, because for many years, they’ve also lost money, investing too much in ships, then the market beats them down. It’s all very cyclical.”

*****

One revenue stream which O’Reilly has turned away from, to the chagrin of the tourism groups, is cruise ships.

The cruise trade is Ireland’s highest per capita spending element of the tourism economy but was devastated within weeks of Covid-19 erupting early in 2020 and changes to Dublin Port’s approach mean the industry is unlikely to be rebuilt out of the city’s berths.

“The cruise business was quite big, pre-Covid and we earned good money from it,” O’Reilly said.

“Nearly 100 per cent of the monies we got in revenue went straight to profit. It was about €5 million a year, so really valuable but because we were accommodating  cruise ships on cargo berths, we were having to book those berths on specific days, at times up to two years in advance.

“What Brexit caused to happen was a huge increase in the volume of goods going to continental Europe so the ships carrying those goods, or a large proportion of ships carrying those goods, are calling onto the berths we had previously used for cruises.

“Therefore, you can’t pre-book a slot on a day, two years in advance on a berth, where the demand for that berth is rapidly rising.”

Dublin Port held a consultation in 2019 looking for external investment to create new cruise-specific berths, but there was no finance forthcoming and, as a result, it has scaled back on the number of cruises it books slots for, to keep them for cargo. 

“It would mop up all of our firepower for investing in projects for cargo capacity. We needed the investment to be off our balance sheet, so we said we couldn’t do it,” said O’Reilly. 

“The only cruise ships we will be able to take into Dublin port are small cruise ships up to what we refer to as berth 18, which is right beside the Tom Clarke bridge. Bigger cruise ships are going to anchor in the bay and tender into Dún Laoghaire.”

O’Reilly is frank during our hour-long interview, which takes place with the literal backdrop of a P&O ship, docked at one of the port’s northern berths, and his own retirement. 

The sacking of 800 P&O workers last month to be replaced with cheaper agency crews, who are paid as little as £1.80 an hour, reflected the special ability for maritime workers to operate outside the labour laws of the countries in which they dock. 

Despite Irish Ferries having done something similar in 2005, O’Reilly calls the move by the Dubai-owned P&O “unconscionable”.

“I wouldn’t exactly be a card-carrying member of a trade union, but it does show the importance of things like the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) which is a worldwide trade union looking after the interests of seafarers.”

“In Dublin, there have been cases of crews being left unpaid and ships abandoned, and it’s appalling but what P&O has done, it’s unconscionable.”

Labour laws that govern maritime workers are outside O’Reilly’s remit, but he confirms that typically the only Irish people working on board the ships coming in and out of Dublin Port are ship masters. 

“By and large, the crews are from all around the world, some from the Philippines,  Ukraine, Russia, India. That’s the international nature of shipping.

“It is the way that the industry works all across Europe and worldwide. Ships are registered in places like the Marshall Islands and the Solomon Islands and you might own a ship, but you’d have a crewing agency that would provide the crew.” 

Despite the British government’s discontent over the P&O crews being fired, it seems unlikely now any action will be taken and the shipping industry will continue to operate with crews paid far below the minimum wage of the countries they travel between, and with no paid holidays or rest days. 

O’Reilly’s own plans for the future is where we leave the interview. Retirement from the public sector is fast looming and he’s been populating his LinkedIn since he made the announcement he would be stepping down.

What lies ahead for him now is a return to private sector consultancy work, leaving the port and the legacy he has built over the years behind. 

“It can be very challenging at times, people tend to make friends that work down here. So I have a lot of people I’ve known for many years, including good friends I’ve made over the years. 

“But I’ve worked for 41 years now,  12 of those in the public sector, the rest of the private sector. I’m going to go back into private sector, be self-employed.

“Transport and energy are the big things I’m interested in, given my background. So we’ll see.”