Brisbane’s St Patrick’s corporate lunch will be a five-hour affair

THE Irish certainly know how to party, with Brisbane St Patrick’s Day corporate lunch next month scheduled be a five- hour affair.

The Brisbane St Patrick’s corporate lunch will be a five-hour affair starting at noon at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre

THE Irish certainly know how to party. The Brisbane St Patrick’s corporate lunch will be a five-hour affair starting at noon at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre on March 16. “It’s a proper lunch,” says Celtic Legal founder Brendan Long, whose firm is one of the sponsors of the event that will feature a performance by comedian Paul Martell.

“There will be no ambiguity about going back to work.”

Long, who moved to Australia from Ireland about a decade ago, says the Irish business community remains a strong presence in the city.

When he’s not practising law, Long can usually be found partaking in hurling - probably the most Irish of sports besides drinking Guinness.

The young lawyer, who also is president of the Brisbane Hurling and Camogie Club, describes hurling as a cross between “hockey and murder.” Long, who did his law degree in Ireland, founded Celtic Legal in 2016 and specialises in insolvency and commercial law.

TRAIN CRAZY

MORE on the issue of the declining amount of freight being sent by rail to and from the Port of Brisbane.

We reported yesterday that container freight sent to and from the port has slipped to less than 3 per cent of total container traffic from almost 13 per cent in 2006.

City Beat reader Ray Rickwood, who is a past president of the Wynnum Chamber of Commerce, wrote to us to point out a dual gauge rail line was opened to the port in 1997 to take shipping containers to Sydney and Melbourne and reduce the amount of heavy vehicles on the highway.

Rickwood says he has crossed over the line at Pritchard St, Wynnum North for 20 years and has “never seen a train on the standard line as it is rusty through non-use.”

The Port of Brisbane points out the fundamental problem is that over time putting freight on rail has simply become too costly and too inefficient, which is why there aren’t more freight trains using the existing corridor.

“It’s a sad reality that only 2.5 per cent of containers that arrived at the Port of Brisbane in 2016-17 came on rail,” a port spokesman said. “Globally, it’s not unusual for ports to have anywhere between 15 per cent and 30 per cent of its freight arrive on rail.” Freight has to share the corridor with passenger trains, meaning there is a need for a dedicated rail link to the port. The planned Brisbane to Melbourne inland freight line stops at the Acacia Ridge rail terminal.

MORE TRUCKS

YOUR diarist’s nasty experience with an aggressive truck driver on the Bruce Highway last week has prompted a response from Queensland Trucking Association chief executive Gary Mahon. Mahon points out that the majority of the trucking industry operate their vehicles “efficiently, reliably and safely” and make a vital contribution to the economy.

On the issue of rail versus road, Mahon points out the heavy vehicle industry undertakes the vast majority of the freight business. “While a rail solution to the Port of Brisbane has its merits our community is going to substantially rely on heavy transport for a considerable time yet,” Mahon says. Mahon makes some valid points and your diarist was not attempting to suggest all truck drivers were as reckless as the one he unfortunately encountered.

PR FAIL

PUBLIC relations 101 is probably not to send internal emails to the press. When a City Beat colleague requested an interview with RACQ about Queensland’s compulsory third-party insurance scheme the response was that everyone was too “flat out.” Instead a statement was sent to the paper. Unfortunately attached to that was an internal RACQ email from chief spinner Paul Turner that said there was “real downside” in speaking to the journalist about the issue. Go figure.