The tide wouldn’t take her out...

The Revenue Commissioners appoint officers around the coast to manage any unfortunate events, and they take control of abandoned vessels.

Plenty of lead balloons were dropping in the cork revenue offices over the weekend as officials realised Storm Dennis brought them an unwanted gift… the MV Alta – abandoned for nearly 2 years on the high seas, floating around the Atlantic like Shane Ross at a count centre!

In fairness, The Receiver of Wrecks immediately took control of the situation and one of the first pieces of work they announced is that they will be engaging specialist contractors to assess the situation and deal with the vessel.

In a way, this is identical to the way that business and government departments need to engage specialist contractors to manage their IT projects. Put simply, the expertise does not exist at a general level in business or government to build an IT platform or beef up online security to keep our personal data safe. 

In a similar way the expertise does not exist in the civil service to float a ship. Perhaps the most popular party might be able to point in the direction of explosives to blow it up at on the water, though with no Royals on board its probably not a runner.

Anyhow the local Revenue and Council have engaged specialist contractors to solve the problem, much like the specialist contractors we see at ICON Accounting, solving IT and Engineering challenges that are at a specialist level.

As for the MV Alta, we can only hope the high tide takes her back to sea to be blown up by a county with weapon that aren’t docked in Cork due to HR problems!