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Will the Dunoon Ferry Action Group now think really BIG?

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The Dunoon Ferry Action Group is rightly famous for having screwed the entirely unnecessary, hugely expensive and markedly ineffective MV Coruisk out of Deputy First Minister and Infrastructure Secretary, Nicola Sturgeon – as a supplementary vessel over the winter period on the Argyll Ferries’ Gourock Dunoon passenger service.

The Action Group pulled off this bald political leverage stunt twice, last winter, 2013-14, where Coruisk’s performance was demonstrably little more weather resilient than either of the company’s two normal vessels; and its assignment to this coming winter, 2014-15 – an announcement made just under a month before the Indy vote in September.

The complete facts of the Coruisk’s deployment last season are here: Boat for votes as Deputy First Minister spends another £700k on Coruisk for Gourock-Dunoon route. Her deployment cost £87 subsidy per passenger crossing. By contrast, the private sector Western Ferries charges around £5 on discount tickets – and makes a profit.

However, now a new and particularly luscious bait is on the near horizon for the ambitious Dunoon Ferry Action Group.

CMAL’s new vehicle and passenger ferry, MV Loch Seaforth, commissioned for lease to CalMac for the Ullapool to Stornoway route, arrived in the Clyde this morning, 7th November 2014, as recorded here by Jamie Black.

She cannot go into service yet on her designated route across The Minch because her design necessitates structural changes in both harbours. The works in Stornoway are in process and those at Ullapool are understood not to be due to commence until 2015.

So the Loch Seaforth will be tootling around in the Clyde for some time.

Will the opportunist eyes of the Ferry Action Group fall upon her next, claiming she might as well be working for her keep? They might see her as a fitting match for their ambitions for the restitution of a second vehicle and passenger service on a route rendered redundant by the efficient and cost effective private sector operation provided between Dunoon and Gorock by Western Ferries?

Coruisk expensively hauls her needless vehicle-carrying bulk on winter passenger service on the Gourock-Dunoon route as a political sop to the vanities of a group who, had they prioritised their campaign to the town’s needs -  could by now have achieved the delivery of the first class passenger service Dunoon can use – on new boats, or a least on one justifiable new boat, with the existing Argyll Flyer acting in support during peak usage times.

The Scottish Government’s commitment to supporting the rescued Ferguson’s shipyard at nearby Port Glasgow would make sense of an order for a new passenger ferry being placed there.

EU rules require the Scottish Government’s ferry transport subsidies to be proportionate to need. It is already arguable that the cost of the deployment of Coruisk last winter was way beyond proportionate to need, given the facts outlined in the article linked above. Now she is to be deployed again, doubling the abusive waste of scarce public funds.

If the EU rules are of so little account, it would make no more nonsense to run the Loch Seaforth on the Gourock Dunoon passenger route – and what’s a few more structural alterations at the two ports?

Such a daft deployment would be little more ruritanian in scale than the pantomime of last winter, crowned by Coruisk bringing her pointless winter duty to an end by hitting the breakwater at Dunoon and damaging her bow ramp – at a substantial added cost of over £360,000 to the Scottish Government [a cost revealed by The Greenock Telegraph's determined pursuit using FoI.].


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