A day of international shuttle diplomacy between the Irish and German authorities was not enough to save the Moroccan national team’s participation in this year’s An Post Rás after the riders got stranded in Germany.
The five-man team did not have their visas in place and so were refused permission by the German authorities to board a plane in Frankfurt this morning, Saturday, that was bound for Dublin.
After an appeal from the race organiser Dermot Dignam, the office of the Taoiseach intervened.
By early afternoon Enda Kenny’s officials had contacted the Garda authorities and the Department of Foreign Affairs and to their immense credit had secured visa waivers so the team could enter Ireland.
This decision was communicated to the German immigration authorities in Frankfurt Airport, thus clearing the way by early afternoon today for the riders to catch the plane to Dublin in time for the race start tomorrow.
Advertisement
However, by the time the Irish and German authorities had put the arrangements in place, the team’s manager – who had arrived in Dublin on Friday night ahead of his squad – had told his riders by phone that he did not think they would be getting to Ireland.
He had instructed them to catch a train from Frankfurt to another UCI ranked race that he organised for them to ride at the last minute.
When the manager was informed by the Rás organisation that the way was clear for the riders to come to Ireland after all, the team members had just boarded the train out of Frankfurt.
Repeated frantic efforts to contact them before they had travelled too far from Frankfurt came to nothing and they were well out of the city when they were finally reached. Dignam confirmed to stickybottle this evening that the team will not be on the start line in Dunboyne tomorrow.
“It’s a great pity because it’s the national team and we believe they are pretty much the riders that will be going to the Olympics,” he said.
Related News
Dignam added the Irish Government officials had put in a very long day to secure the visa waivers and said he was grateful to them for their work.
The Moroccan team manager, Andrēas Petermann, is a German national who was a top flight international rider in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was part of the German team that won the World Team Time Trial title in 1979. He was also 10th in the Olympic Games road race in Moscow in 1980.
The Moroccan team were told by the Rás organisers several times at regular intervals in recent months that they needed to get the proper visas in place but apparently failed to act on this advice.
When they tried to leave Frankfurt to travel to Ireland they were told that the Irish authorities would not recognise their Schengen area travel visas and so they were refused permission to board the plane to Dublin.
The Schengen Area covers a large number of European countries. Non EU nationals who get a Schengen visa can travel through those countries covered by the Schengen agreement on one single visa rather than having to apply for separate visas for different countries.
However, Ireland is not part of the Schengen area. It means while the visas the Moroccans had were valid for travel between most of the States in the EU, they were not valid for Ireland.
They should have put in place specific additional visas allowing for their travel to Ireland.
The riders were stopped in Germany because had they been allowed to board the flight to Ireland they would have been refused permission to land in the Republic and flown from Dublin airport back to Frankfurt on the first available flight.
The cost of the return flights would have been footed by the Germans, under international rules aimed at discouraging lax immigration controls at departure countries.
Topics
