Wednesday, January 24, 2007

The Honeydew II Trawler Disaster and Uninformed Opinion.

It's a tragedy when two men lose their lives while trying to earn a living for themselves and their families. I'm sure the relatives of Ger Bohan and Tomasz Jagla are grieving much at the loss of these two men. However, reading through the Irish Examiner on Tuesday the 23rd, I was aghast at the comments of a certain John O'Mahony, friend of one of the deceased fishermen. He claimed that the Navy search effort was "terrible" and derided the decision of the Navy not to send in divers (in bad weather) to aid the search effort claiming "A sports diver could go down in that".

Mr. O'Mahony must have a very short memory. It was only last year that in a similar search for a sunken vessel, Navy divers called off a dive citing dangerous weather conditions. Disregarding this, a "sports diver" as O'Mahony eloquently put it went into the water to try and retrieve the bodies. The episode ended in tragically, with the diver being pulled from the water and later dying.

I can understand Mr. O'Mahony's urgency to get the bodies out of the water. What I can't understand however is The Irish Examiner allowed his negative and uninformed comments about the Navy being published. Lazy journalism I suppose.

3 comments:

Des said...

The examiner is a ragged shadow of itsformer self and is just as sensationalist and ill-informed as the Indo.

The Honeydew II events seem to have raised a lot of hackles due to misleading reports. Last week Tom Mc Sweeney was on RTE Radio 1 criticising his colleagues who he said spread misinformation about the operational uses of the Navy's Vessel Managmenent System (this was in rsponse to claims that the Navy should have noticed the trawlers were gone off screen).

Carrigaline said...

It really is unbelievable at times, do people have any cop on? Do they not forget that we only have eight seagoing vessels. At any one time, we would usually have six or so available (one usually in maintanence and the other one at sea). The remaining ships are thus relied upon to secure our entire coastline.

Not only that, but in extremely adverse conditions, it's not safe for any of our ships to be sent to sea. During the Canadian sub rescue mission, one of our biggest and most modern ship was battered and ended up in dry dock for weeks.

Even if we had 50 ships with state of the art warning systems, the Honeydew disaster couldn't have been stopped.

gammagoblin said...

Look the real question here is, where the fuck is superman when you need him!

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