Details
The harbour has four berths. Passenger ferries operate to and from Fishguard (Stena Line) and Pembroke Dock (Irish Ferries) in Wales, and to Cherbourg and Roscoff in France.
An all-weather RNLI lifeboat is on station, and the Irish Coast Guard helicopter at Waterford Airport provides air-sea rescue cover,.
An automatic weather station is maintained adjacent to the port by Met Éireann
The Europort is the only Irish seaport with experience of offshore windfarm construction. Components of the wind turbines for Arklow Bank windfarm were shipped into Rosslare, assembed in the Europort, and shipped out to the windfarm site where they were installed and commissioned.
The port also receives ships importing new cars into the country. The importer depot is in Rosslare Harbour Village.
The port area is largely on reclaimed land. Reclamation work continued to the late 1990s, when the northwest part of the port was constructed using a dragline. Modernisation of facilities has continued to encourage the increase in cars carried on the ferries despite a drop in foot passengers.
Facilities in the terminal building include a café cum shop, ferry company desks and self-service left-luggage lockers. Railway services to Wexford and Dublin Connolly are located at new platform. Bus services to Wexford, Dublin, Cork, and Waterford leave from just outside. Bus and rail connections to Cork, County Kerry, and Limerick, and bus connections to County Clare & Galway are available from Waterford.
Although the Europort is exposed to the northeast, the prevailing winds are from the southwest. The Europort therefore rarely closes because of bad weather, although its competitors work hard at putting out the opposite story!
At Rosslare, Iarnród Éireann is an infrastructure provider and operator, providing port facilities and related services, including stevedoring, to shipping lines. Rosslare Europort is operated as a Common User Terminal, meaning that the port authority carries out all stevedoring activities on a common user basis for all shipping lines using the port.
Rosslare has also handled rolltrailer traffic in the recent past, when Cobelfret operated a service from Rosslare to Zeebrugge/Rotterdam (October 2008 to September 2009). Rolltrailers enable the carriage of lift-on lift-off (LoLo) traffic on roll-on roll-off (RoRo) ships.
Rosslare Europort is the second most strategically important seaport in the State after Dublin. It is the second-busiest port in terms of ship visits & gross tonnage, and handles more unitised freight than any other Irish seaport except Dublin - in fact Rosslare handles more unitised freight than all other seaports in the State, excluding Dublin, put together. Unitised freight is important because all of the high added-value exports on which Ireland’s economic recovery depends are exported as unitised freight.
Rosslare’s location at the southeastern corner of the island is also a strategically significant factor. Counties Carlow, Kildare, Kilkenny, Laois, Tipperary South, Waterford, Wexford & Wicklow, with a combined population of 925,000 are all within 90 minutes of Rosslare. Also easily drivable are Dublin (pop 1,270,603), Cork (pop 269,210) & Limerick (pop 128,491); thus a population of 2.7m or 58% of the population of the State are within 2½ hours of the Europort.
Rosslare Europort is well connected to the national roads network:
• M11/N11 & M1 to Dublin & the North
• N24 & 25 to Cork, Limerick, etc. (Atlantic Corridor)
• N80 to the Midlands & the West and via the M9 to Southwest Dublin
Rosslare is also rail-connected, and IE plan rail freight services when the Europort breaks into the LoLo sector.
Rosslare Europort is also strategically important to the Southeast Region, being by far the biggest port in the region, accounting for over 55% of all freight traffic through the region’s seaports, and over 80% of the strategically important unitised traffic. Rosslare Europort is the only passenger seaport in the Southeast Region (906,050 passengers in 2011), and makes a far greater contribution to national and regional tourism than the only Airport, Waterford Airport, (77,465 passengers in 2011).
Key economic sectors dependent on Rosslare Europort include:
• Food & beverage (beef, lamb, dairy, beer, cider, whiskey, soft drink concentrates, bottled water, etc.)
• ICT (information and communications technology)
• Pharmaceuticals & life sciences
• Construction supplies
• Light engineering (e.g. agricultural equipment)
It has been estimated that the overall economic contribution of ferry-based tourism through Rosslare Europort was €543M in 2004, with an estimated net overall employment impact of 5,130 full-time equivalent jobs.
Read more about this topic: Rosslare Europort
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