A mother-of-three has swapped her life in Co Wicklow to take control of thousands of tonnes of food aid being shipped in to east Africa.
Mary O'Neill claims she is a housewife at heart, but during her working week faces the threat of pirates taking over her vessels in the Indian Ocean. The 49-year-old widow, from Arklow, is port captain for the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) at Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
In the last decade she has also been in charge of aid reaching some of the world's most disadvantaged people in Eritrea and Iraq and victims of the tsunami in Indonesia.
"My dad is always worried about my security so I call home once or twice a week," said Mrs O'Neill, who had all her knitting shipped out as part of her big move.
"But my mother came from seafaring family so she is quite practical and admires me."
Since her arrival in Dar es Salaam in March, the mother-of-three has taken in 170,000 tonnes of food aid and sent it across Tanzania to people in need in DR Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda. Food is also shipped back out to Somalia in convoy.
"Pirates are a major problem," she said. "You have to be very cautions and keep yourself informed. You have to be aware of the security situation all the time.
"Generally they don't happen down this far but the pirates are becoming more daring all the time."
Mrs O'Neill began working at her brother-in-law's shipbroking firm, Maritime Chartering, around 15 years ago when her husband Michael was forced to give up work with heart problems.
Within weeks the office secretary was chartering vessels for the Irish Sugar company and Dairy Board and shipping thousands of tonnes of beef and pork to the Persian Gulf and Far East.
But it was during the Balkans conflict in the late 1990s that she got her first taste of working with the UN when the firm handled a shipment of canned fish from Donegal to Montenegro. In 2001 the shipbroker spent six months at the port of Massawa in Eritrea, sending food to displaced and hungry people caught in the conflict with Ethiopia.
She was later called back to the UN's headquarters in Rome and for more than two years handled aid going to Iraq and Indonesia.
Mrs O'Neill returned home four years ago when her husband's health deteriorated. Michael died from cancer in March 2006 at the age of 56.
"He was my pillar," said Mrs O'Neill, whose three children are now in university. "Trying to find a coping mechanism was very difficult. Even though I knew I could go out and make a living he had been the glue that held us all together. The children kept me going."
She now believes the training ship the
Asgard, originally built in Arklow, should also be raised or a replica built to take the town out of the recession. "The men who built that ship, the carpenters, the painters, the sail makers, all those skills are still there and the potential is there to make another
Asgard," she added.
"Sometimes it takes a project like this to lift the spirit in the community."
Mrs O'Neill said the vessel is also vital to for anyone who wants to get that spirit of the sea. "These are all skills that have to be maintained or we will lose them in one generation," she added.
PA