Justification for mass P&O sackings ‘shown to be false’ as owners of ferry firm post record-busting three-quarters of a billion pounds in profit

Sammy Wilson was commenting on news tonight that DP World, which controls the ferry firm, had made an unprecedented £736 million in the first six months of this year.

His East Antrim constituency encompasses Larne, whose port is used by P&O to run freight and passengers to Cairnryan and back – the shortest link between the island of Ireland and Great Britain.

Frances O’Grady, head of the umbrella body the Trades Union Congress, said tonight’s news stands as “an insult to common decency”.

In a move which shocked the corporate world, on March 17 P&O summarily sacked roughly 800 sailors, sending in security guards to escort many of them off the ships on which they worked.

The company said: “We needed fundamental change to make the business viable ... once we knew it was the only way to save the business, we had to act.”

Mr Wilson said the news of unheard-of profits at DP World makes this explanation “a difficult story to sell”, adding that P&O’s move had disrupted “one of the main lifelines for transport into Northern Ireland ... and put in jeopardy parts of our economy”.

Ms O’Grady added that “DP World have been allowed to get away scot-free with behaving like corporate gangsters”.

The mass sackings led to cancellations of sailings, followed by the rapid replacement of the normal crews with what the RMT union described as cheaper “foreign labour”.

A couple of weeks later, the coastguard impounded P&O’s European Causeway ferry in Larne on safety grounds.

Then, on April 12, the News Letter reported on the results of their inspection.

Remarkably, the vessel had the worst report of any passenger ferry inspected in the last three years within the ‘Paris MOU’ zone (the trans-Atlantic inspection area to which the UK belongs) in terms of the sheer number of flaws uncovered: 31 in all.

To put that into some perspective, there were over 1,200 such ferry inspections in that three-year period.

The problems on board ranged across the areas of fire safety, evacuation systems, propulsion, closing devices/watertight doors, staff being unfamiliar with radio equipment, as well as finding failings on four different counts under the heading “labour conditions”.

Mr Wilson, MP for East Antrim, said at the time that the mass redundancies raised “serious concerns about the company’s morality”.

And tonight he said that “the group as a whole is making record profits; it doesn’t matter where – why would you treat workers like that?”

Since DP World is enjoying such healthy profits, he hopes it will make good on long-standing upgrades to Larne and Cairnryan.

Summing up his feelings on their financial results, he said: “The whole of the justification P&O had for not investing in the port, not investing in their workers, cutting wages, has now proved to be false.”

It will serve to “make the treatment of their workers seem even more wrong” he added.

DP World’s Dubai-based boss Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem said he was “delighted to report a record set of first half results” for the year.

VIDEO: Union savages P&O as coastguard impounds Larne ferry – whilst Dutch dockers blockade vessel in solidarity