Crossing the Irish Sea: The Trials, Tribulations and Simple Pleasures of Going Home

While I now live in Coventry, and spend the vast majority of the year in England, I originally come from Bangor, in Northern Ireland. (No, not Bangor in Wales.) For most of my friends, going home usually involves a train journey of perhaps a few hours; but for me, going home means getting across the Irish Sea, either by ferry or by plane.

When I was very young, even up until I was 13, most of our family holidays involved car journeys either to other parts of Ireland, north or south, or across on the ferry to "the mainland" (i.e., Great Britain). From 1996 onwards, our preferred mode of ferry crossing was the Stena HSS, a class of high-speed catamaran capable of carrying up to 1500 passengers and 375 cars, making them the largest high-speed ferries in the world.

Although Stena had grandiose plans, just three examples were ultimately built. The first, the Stena Explorer, went into service in April 1996 sailing between Dun Laoghaire (pronounced Dun Leery), just south of Dublin, and Holyhead, on the north-west coast of Wales. On entering service, it sailed the 62-mile crossing in just 99 minutes, just over half the time that conventional ferries took previously. What's more, the crossing was smoother than ever before thanks to the catamaran hull. When introduced it sailed an impressive five times a day in each direction.

The second HSS, the Stena Voyager, entered service a few months later sailing between Belfast and Stranraer, on the south-western tip of Scotland. The crossing was shorter, at about 50 miles, and a journey time of 85 minutes was initially advertised. However, unlike the Dun Laoghaire-Holyhead route, which is almost entirely in open seas, both Belfast and Stranraer lie at the head of long inlets. As a result, when the HSS first tried running at full speed in Belfast Lough, it caused such huge waves to head towards the shores - in particular, towards Bangor - that for safety reasons they were required to reduce speed in Belfast Lough, and also in Loch Ryan on the approach to Stranraer.

This meant that the journey time for Belfast-Stranraer became 105 minutes, still better than anything else that operated Belfast-Stranraer but comparable to the fastest boats on the Larne-Cairnryan route. Larne is about 20 miles NNE of Belfast in open seas, while Cairnryan is about 5 miles north of Stranraer; thus the Larne-Cairnryan ferries only had to sail 35 miles, nearly all in open seas. For us, though, Larne was the wrong side of Belfast Lough, and involved a 35-mile drive just to get to the port; we were thus more than happy to save the driving and sail from Belfast on the HSS.

A third HSS, the Stena Discoverer, was put into service in 1997 sailing between Harwich and Hoek van Holland, but that was it. While the HSS continued to sail on its three original routes, it was - at least economically speaking - fatally flawed: it was powered not by conventional diesel engines but by gas turbines, like you'd find in jet planes, with no conventional propeller but instead four water jets providing both forward propulsion and directional control. This gave the HSS its speed, but also meant it consumed far more fuel than any other comparable ferry.

High fuel consumption wasn't such a problem in 1996, when oil prices were low and looked set to stay that way indefinitely; however, by 2008 oil prices had soared and so cutbacks had to be made. The number of sailings was gradually cut from five to just one or two round trips per day, and journey times were prolonged in order to save fuel. The Stena Explorer even stopped sailing between Dun Laoghaire and Holyhead altogether between September and May, replaced by conventional ferries. Finally, in order to shorten the journey a little, the dock at Belfast was moved down Belfast Lough by a few miles - saving fuel but prolonging journey times to the port.

Ultimately, however, it wasn't enough to save the HSS. The Stena Discoverer was withdrawn from the Harwich-Hoek van Holland route in January 2007. The other two survived a while longer, but the Stena Voyager was withdrawn from sailing the Belfast-Stranraer route in November 2011. The Stena Explorer faces an uncertain future on the Dun Laoghaire-Holyhead route; whether it will return to service in May, as planned, remains to be seen.

The Stena Voyager was replaced by two conventional-hulled large ferries, Superfast VII and VIII, originally built in 2001 to serve Helsinki-Tallinn. In introducing these two new ferries, Stena decided they needed to upgrade the facilities at their now rather dilapidated port in Stranraer. Here, they decided to do the same as they had done in Belfast and move the port a few miles down Loch Ryan to save fuel - also giving them more space to build a larger terminal building. The new port is now nearer Cairnryan than Stranraer.

The move from Stranraer to Cairnryan makes little difference to car and lorry traffic - which make up the bulk of Stena's throughput - but was a disaster for foot passengers. You see, while Stranraer has a railway station, Cairnryan does not. This thus forces any foot passengers wishing to use the ferries to use a bus to the port. Rather than bussing ferry passengers from Stranraer station to the port, Stena have decided instead to bus passengers from Ayr.

This is mainly down to the nature of the railway line from Ayr to Stranraer: it doesn't pass anywhere near Cairnryan, because instead of following the coast the line curves inland to follow a valley, only rejoining the coast briefly at Girvan. This makes the line slow and winding, making it faster to bus passengers along the A77 from Ayr than rely on the railway to Stranraer.

It also means there is no easy way to provide a station at Cairnryan, without building a new seven-mile connection from the line at Stranraer. As such, the very reason for the existence of the railway line south of Ayr - the connection to ferries to Northern Ireland - has been removed at a stroke. Passenger numbers have fallen through the floor in recent months, with only the towns of Girvan, Barrhill and Stranraer to sustain the line.

At this point I should declare an interest: I can't drive. So the existence of a relatively integrated public transport system in which I can get a train to Stranraer and then a ferry to Belfast is important to me. However, much as I enjoy making the train journey to or from Stranraer, it normally takes at least seven hours from Coventry - about four hours to either Carlisle or Glasgow, and another three hours thence to Stranraer. It was not, to put it mildly, the fastest way of getting home.

It was, however, the cheapest: at £25 single (with a railcard) all the way from Belfast to Leamington, it was an absolute steal. Nonetheless, the fact that it was at best a full twelve-hour journey meant that I only did it once in full, and once more when I was up in Edinburgh and then heading straight home. However, while the fares haven't gone up, they have become less flexible; in theory you used to be able to get those fares on the day, but now you must book in advance; combined with the hassle of getting a bus, I doubt it's an option I'll be availing myself of anytime soon.

To me, most of the time, going home means flying. Cheap short-haul air travel has put a severe dent in the ferry companies' business over the last 20 years by removing the necessity of a long drive through north Wales or southern Scotland. Normally I can book a few weeks in advance and have change from £100 for a return flight home, which while it works out at double the cost, it takes less than half the time to get there.

I almost invariably fly between Birmingham and Belfast City on Flybe, formerly Jersey European, who fly a very large range of domestic flights within the UK as well as some cross-channel flights to Paris and other parts of France. (I've flown with them so many times, I almost know their safety announcement off by heart...) With an average flying time of about 45 minutes, I can reliably get between my house in Coventry and home in Northern Ireland in less than four hours. 

Flying even permits day trips from one island to the other: in 2004/05 when I was looking at different universities I flew over on various day trips for open days; more recently I flew home for a day in November 2010 for a hospital check-up (it was easier to fly home than to rearrange it). Doing so by ferry would be all but impossible nowadays. That said, even up to 1990 there was a daily sleeper train service between Stranraer and London, which would have permitted a 36-hour round-trip on two sleepers, but that's nothing compared to a same-day trip.

However, flying is not really a sustainable mode of transport. It uses much more fuel than a ferry, and given the finite supply of oil in the world there will come a point where short-haul air travel is no longer cheap and available to the masses. When that day comes - be it in ten, a hundred or a thousand years' time - we will rue the day that Stena decided, for short-term commercial reasons, to break the link between ferry and train at Stranraer.

At least for the time being the connection at Holyhead remains, but at the other end one either arrives in Dun Laoghaire and needs a suburban train into Dublin, or one arrives in Dublin Port and has to get a bus to one of Dublin's railway stations. It is that, combined with a slight instinct of distrust towards Irish trains, that has thus far put me off going via Holyhead by train. That said, as a means of getting between Northern Ireland and England by road, Dublin-Holyhead is my family's preferred route as it is shorter overall than Belfast-Stranraer, and doesn't require such sustained periods of driving.

In the meantime, I expect that most of my trips home will involve flying. Yes, government responses to successive terrorist threats have made it more difficult to retain one's sense of dignity as we pass through security. Yes, you can't take a bottle of water onto the plane unless you buy it at the airport. Yes, my ears don't always pressurise quite right when we descend. And yes, eventually we will run out of oil and future generations may despise us for using up two billion years' worth of accumulated energy from the sun.

But - and it is a huge but - for a modest sum of money, not only do I get to soar above the clouds and see the world from above like our forefathers could only dream of, I get to go home - a distance of some 400 miles as the crow (though not the aeroplane) flies - in just a few hours. And until the day comes that short-haul air travel is commercially unviable and we are forced to use what ferries and trains are left, I shall continue to enjoy the simple pleasures of flying home.