THE SHANNON Foynes Port Company this week announced that it will invest €32million in positioning Shannon Foynes Port as a national and international supply chain hub of scale.
The significant investment will see a new jetty expansion and a new logistics park developed at the port, moving towards the company’s Vision 2041 plan targetting the Estuary’s establishment as a global floating offshore wind hub and freight logistics cluster.
The two-year programme of works saw the jetty works completed, adding an additional 117m jetty and 12,000 square metres of jetty set/down storage by linking the existing east and west jetties at Foynes Port.
The company also secured planning permission to develop a serviced port logistics park nearby on a 38 hectare site with planning permission for a 127,000sq/ft warehouse already granted and with immediate potential for a further 400,000sq/ft of modern logistics warehousing to be developed.
Welcoming the investment, Minister of State at the Department of Transport James Lawless said that move shows huge ambition.
“As an island nation, our ports are crucial for economy, with 90 per cent of Ireland’s traded goods passing through our ports. Shannon Foynes is one of our three Tier 1 ports in Ireland and has served this part of the island particularly well, but this expansion reflects both the ambition and opportunity of the port to deepen its impact significantly at a national level but also internationally in the area of offshore energy and logistics supply chain,” Minister Lawless said.
Limerick Minister of Further and Higher Education Patrick O’Donovan added that the investment is “all about the future, about ensuring that we have the infrastructure in place not just in this region but in Ireland to create a future where economic growth and sustainability go hand in glove”.
Minister O’Donovan said that “Shannon Foynes Port has been planning for that future as far back as a decade ago with the launch of its masterplan Vision 2041 and a great thing about what we are unveiling today also is that it is a port authority that clearly delivers on its ambition”.
Shannon Foynes Port CEO Pat Keating said that “we’re building for the future here and we are effectively enabling the future here”.
“It’s a future that we all want for generations following us as we’re investing heavily in infrastructure that will do two things. One is to accelerate our journey as a nation to become a world leader in offshore renewable energy by harnessing our limitless wind energy capacity off the Atlantic seaboard. The second thing is that this same infrastructure will enhance our freight capacity massively.”
