The Waterford shipping company which brought the container holding 13 asylum-seekers into Ireland last week is to step up security checks as a result of the tragedy. Eight of the 13 were found dead when the container in which they had stowed away was opened at Wexford Business Park on Saturday morning. The other five are recovering in hospital.
Mr Martin O'Shea, a director of C2C Shipping Lines, told The Irish Times yesterday that in future the seals on all containers being carried by the company would be checked in the Belgian port of Zeebrugge to make sure they had not been tampered with.
The Waterford-based company ferried the container in which the 13 were hiding to Belview Port, near Waterford, on a ship, The Dutch Navigator, chartered from a company in the Netherlands.
Both Mr O'Shea and the chairman of the Port of Waterford Company, Mr Ben Gavin, said yesterday the group most likely intended to travel to Britain, as they could not have expected to survive the 21/2-day crossing to Ireland in a sealed container.
"They are sealed to be watertight," said Mr O'Shea. "If you were inside one for just 10 minutes, in the dark and with no air, you would begin to panic. You wouldn't even think of putting someone in for two days and it's not something we would have expected anyone to try."
Once the container was loaded on to the ship, the people inside had no chance of attracting attention, he said. It was placed in the lower hold of the vessel, well out of the crew's hearing range.
"It's not like a passenger ship where you have people moving around on the decks. There was just no way you would hear them."
C2C, which has been in operation for 14 months, would co-operate with any measures designed to reduce the likelihood of the incident happening again, and in the meantime would begin carrying out its own checks, he said.
Responding to a suggestion that the Port of Waterford Company, which manages Belview Port, might have detected earlier that the seal on the container had been tampered with, Mr Gavin said it would not be practical to check the seal on every container delivered.
He said 1,200 containers a week were handled at Waterford and it would not be possible to check the seal on each one. The container in which the eight people died had been re-sealed, he pointed out. It was only when a physical attempt was made to open it that it became apparent it had been tampered with.
There was no reason to suspect, he added, that Waterford would be targeted by people trafficking refugees. With the exception of some sailings from Britain, the port at Belview only handled consignments which had been at sea for at least two days, a journey people would not knowingly undertake in a sealed container.
"I think this was a mistake," he said, referring to the Wexford tragedy. "If they knew it was going to Ireland, they never would have got on."
Zeebrugge, he said, was primarily a roll-on, roll-off port and most P&O business from there was bound for Britain, which increased his belief that the group chose a P&O container in the expectation that that was where it was headed.
