Back to work

 Just in case you thought we were all broke. This is the price tag for a TV.Not a car

A statue on the roadside near to Hillsboro. It is to Harry Ferguson the tractor man.
Inventor of the 3 point hitch and much more.

The best thing about going away is coming home again.
It was a good convention. Could you believe I paid £20 for one magic secret.
A card predicted found in a position in another deck deck Click here to see it.
Now there is a mystery and a half for sure !

I am in the process of renewing my taxi PSV licence, getting my tax clearance cert which is also linked to whether you have paid your household tax etc.
They say on the radio that Ireland is one of the easiest place to set up a business in Europe.
Do you know that you need 21 permits to set up a restaurant? and that no 2 permits can be found in the same agency..Red tape has us all buggered.  It is death by a thousand knife cuts, first aid kits, fire extinguisher, warning triangle, Hi Viz vest, torch note book pen.
What will come next? Flares, fog horns and defibrillators.
Where will it all end.

Anyhow on the work front today is a shopping day, so I was off with my list. Picking up people as well, there is no point in wasting fuel.
Coming back from Howth with the fish I picked up Lucy Meagher she is a sculptor have a look at her website here At present she is between studios and has take up a part time job to support herself.
Good luck with the work.
The other day I had a movie director who was doing research in our history, he has the makings of a movie and like a river of tar progress is slow. He had a fantastic speaking voice, it had a great ring to it.
I told him he should move in front of the camera.
A girl today going from Sallymount Ave to Lime St.
I knew both streets well but could not pull up either one in my mind..Sat Nav to the rescue.
Then as I approached Lime St. I explained that I must be becoming senile..Lime St. is engraved on my mind since a Phillopena girl asked me for it once....Then she directed me there.
I said how good her English was. "And sure why wouldn't it be good" she said.
Quick as a flash I said "I know who you are.!you're the Rose of Tralee."
You're right she said, and we got on like a house on fire from then on.
She was working for the tourist board back then. Though she has gone from Dublin now.
Her mother was from the Philippians and her father was Irish, her mother passed away just when she was doing her leaving cert. and instead of cracking up she decided to get the best results possible to make her mother in heaven happy..Which she did with flying colors.
So some people or streets you associate with them you should never forget.

A Radiographer, she could see right through me and a food stylist were also in the car.

Then I went down to the Stenna ferry a bit late, as most people were gone I started off to join the other ferry.
 Then came the cry "Taxi"
A young guy around 25 a traveler came running over pulling on his coat and shirt.
His story was that he had smoked his last joint in Holyhead,then when he walked past the drug sniffer dog he pounced on him resulting in a search down to his underpants.
On the way to Connelly station I got an insight into his wild life,some secrets must stay in the taxi.
But before we reached the train station he had to pop over to buy a bag of weed.



By the way Gene from "Cabs are for kissing"is plugging his book here
He told me that I was the first person to buy it

Away for a few days

          Northern Ireland

 Did you notice the wonderful full moon ?
A LED torch on sale in Lidl  3 settings, off, on and SOS. (Morse code)


I was in the local shop the other day checking my Lotto numbers ..No such luck.
But an old guy in front of me did have a good win.
That's great ! the shop girl said "look! if you had the 39 instead of the 38 you would have won €52,000".
I took the results ticket and asked him how much he had won. €2,000 he said and I won €7,000 a few weeks ago!
So I looked at the results..€2,896 was for match 4 + the two bonus numbers.
If indeed he had the "38" he would have shared the jackpot of €25,543,227
1/2 of €25 million would keep us all going for a few weeks.
For true happiness you should keep your win secret.....Lots of nasty things happen when people know you are a millionaire..Friends appear from all over and tell you sad stories and the whole pub expects free drinks. Not to mention threats to kidnap your children.

Once at the bus station I picked up a job and he asked me to take him to the National Lottery HQ.
Its only around the corner I said, but if you really want me to take you there I will oblige.
It is just opposite the Abbey Theater if you really want to know.
Just as he was getting out it hit me how important his journey might be.
Good luck to you I said.
The best advice I can give you is to ask them how to keep it all secret.
But I often wonder, how much he won?
I read in the paper that a homeless man won €2 million and he has donated it all to help homeless and drug addicted people.Good man I say.
The very best advice I can give you if you do win is to tip the taxi drivers really well !

The really good thing about a huge win is that you could help a lot of people in loads of different ways.
There is a book by Connor O'Cleary called "The billionaire who wasn't" It is about a man who made and dispersed a huge fortune. He wanted to keep his scheme secret, but the government passed a law which stated that if you gave away money over a certain amount you had to declare who you were.
Without knowing who he was I brought Mr.Feeney and his wife in from the airport to the Berkley Court.
He gave me advice en route on work life balance, money management, the importance of thanking someone who gives you a lead or advice and many many more useful things.
The next day he got a full page coverage in the Irish Times.
Click here to read just one small biography about him.

That would be around 7 years ago and no one has ever impressed me more, except that I don't usually get "full disclosure" from my passengers.  But then again all people are important in many ways.

So Blackpool magicians convention is here once more.

Tickets bought, flights and hotel booked .

So I will be in the thick of it next weekend life is not all work you know.
You must have a bit of magic in your life.

I will bring you back a bag of magic dust.

Have a look at this  




This is surely a winning act


Now look at the timing, misdirection and comedy of this magic act.
He developed this act when he was in his second year of Circus school.!

St. Valentines day

Dublin has a special link with St.Valentine.
Whitefriars St.church has a relic to St.Valentine,so pop over give it a rub to get a boost to your love life.
Restaurants are jacking up the prices to take advantage of the night thats in it.



An ad for hair colour !
Never could have guessed....

An ad for Guinness.. Never could have guessed it either.



So today I wanted to take a rest then I heard the rain on the window and shot out of bed and worked through the day.
I was very tired and when exhaustion hits your thinking gets bad.
I got a call to a place which was not on the sat.nav. arrived late and she was heading to the other side of the city.. I tried to get her there as best I could..

If she had given me a landmark I would have hit it straight on, but all the comments I got were that she didn't know any of the landmarks where we were.
Then she said the magic words.."Its beside Dundrum Mental Hospital."
You can go over theese things 100 times in your mind to see where you went wrong, believe you me things just do go badly wrong from time to time.

Perhaps tomorrow in a moment od doubt I will ask "Where is it near?"

Yesterday I was heading down by Fairview when I was flagged down by a girl from Lithuania, she was just going to a solicitor who was in Ballybough around the corner.
She was talking on her phone to her friend so much that I feel she missed one vital piece of information.
Her story was that she is pregnant and when her boss found out he sacked her !
When you go to law you must have the right guy by your side, not someone from the golden pages.
I met this guy once he seems red hot. www.hrdoctor.ie  John O'Neill in Bray.Employment law.

I am totally blown away when I see how hard the "New Irish" work.  Without them our progress would be very slow. I had a great looking Turkish doctor in the taxi the other day. Wow if she married my son the fusion of Irish and Turkish would produce fantastic looking kids.
If people were brave enough to marry for love rather than for class or religion or money there would be no wars, because we would be forced to make an effort to understand each other and we wouldn't let anyone hurt our grandchildren either.
The wars in Africa, Gaza and Syria must have the Angels in Heaven in tears.
Yet no one down here cares ?

Taxi drivers in Paris and Marselles are up in arms


Taxis are very scarce in Paris and minicabs are starting to appear.
A taxi licence costs €200,000 and you have to jump through many hoops to get a Taxi plate but the hackney cabs are not regulated to the same extent and operate just outside the law.
In London  the minicabs are robbing loads of people at train stations and outside night clubs every day and the regulators office are doing nothing about it...
A few weeks ago in Dubli a customer from the ferry told me how a minicab drove her around the houses making her late for the train and  then late for the boat, he demanded £40 for what should have been a £15 journey.What I don't understand is why she didn't call the police. After all Euston station is always crawling with police.

I picked up an ex taxi driver the other day he was going into York St. He spoke of the good old days when he went Cosy (like a tea cosy the other driver kept the car warm) with another driver. His guy was a great skin and they got on well. I tried to Cosy once myself but my guy could not get his head around letting me work on Mondays he insisted that my days off should be Monday Tuesday and no other days.
He was a bit stuck in the mud in his ways and a few months later the option of a hackney car came along. Calls were booked in a call center and sent by radio to the radio hackney cars....
My passinger told me that he was at the big meeting in the National Stadium the day degulation became a realityand they were being addressed by the leaders of the taxi union..
"I can tell you that this law will neve come into force as long as we lead this union and as long as we stand together"
Loads of cheering until one voice piped up
"What are you talking about? I was issued with one of the now licencs this morning"
All hell broke loose the value of the permit had dropped from £80,000 to £1500
And the number of taxis in Dublin rose from 2500 to over 12,000 today
So if you were one of the 2 1/2 thousand looking for work
Today you are one of the 12,000 so your work load is much smaller.

Latest I heard is that a New York taxi plate(Medallion)would cost $590,000plus transfer fees

Anyhoooo.

The first book I read about a taxi drive was called "Life in a rear view mirror" By Donal Ruane A Dublin taxi driver.Gill & Macmillan
Then another one by a London taxi driver which was really interesting but I forget what its called.
Peter Franklin wrote the "Gabby Cabby"
The Melissa Plaut a blogger from New York wrote "Hack"
How I stopped worrying about what to do with my life and started driving a yellow cab.
The fellow blogger Eugene Solomon author of "Cabs are for kissing" is now out..






So the burning question is.

John ! Where's your book?

I have started...watch this space.

Welsh invasion !

The Welsh are arriving in their hundreds for Ireland V Wales this weekend.
As I write the rain is lashing down outside.



So I worked while I could.. Most were in good spirits except for one lunatic who accused me of driving him around the houses !
Even though the other guy was saying that it cost them less than the last time

Well Ireland hammered them thank God.  26///3

It serves him right!

Big lads terrible singers!


Later on I picked up the mighty Mike Murphy and I had a great chat with him.He was going out to see Gay Byrne in  The Pavillion  theater.
I was telling him that loads  of his work lives on on youtube.

Here he is with Gay.

Girls for sale !

I have spoken about this before,but it makes very little difference.

You can buy a beer, or a hamburger, some cigarettes or even a person. 

"Sold into prostitution by brother in law in Moldova for €3,000 to Irish pimp"

Serving up to 15 men every day for the last 7 years she was rescued at last.

So was the headline in yesterdays Indapendent newspaper.

I could show you where the brothels are, easy enough to find if you look.

Over the last 15 years I never ever saw any effort by the Garda to break up this cycle of misery.

All I got was "The likes of her should be deported" Link Here

Click here








On the right hand side of the blog there are links to anti trafficking websites.

Happy Birthday dear Prius

           300,000 Kilometers a milestone with no big faults

                I bet he wishes he had chosen a smaller fiddle.

                     Man stands on woman !

A lost photo which is on the notice board in the cafe at the Kesh,
I bet someone would like it back.

Still hanging in there. The weather here is really very bad. One big weather front after another battering us.
At least it will take our minds off the other crap that is going on in the rest of the world.

Rugby was our saviour last weekend.
A guy with a bicycle waved me down on the Clontarf seafront on Sunday.
He was going to Teranure..On the way there he told me why his bike was so special.
He had ridded it from Ireland to Turkey a while back to raise funds for the building of a school in India.
From Turkey he flew to India and did a second leg across India.
Then He arrived at his destination...

When the funds arrived from Ireland he built a school and taught there for a year..

Applause please !!!!!!!

Now he is doing a masters and then he is going to teach for a year in Saudi Arabia to get funds and learn Arabic.
After that he is going to work in the United Nations...

Some people will tell you their life's story while others will hardly give you their destination.

Traffic was mental because of the rugby match, so I was forced to go across traffic rather than go with the flow to get there the quickest route. He panicked at one point as I cut across through Palmerstown sq., but then when we arrived he knew ehrer he was.
I don't know what was wrong but all the traffic going into town was stopped.
So I headed over towards Kimmage and I got a HailO job near to Kimmage Cross road.

Only problem was that I couldn't find the house.

So I rang my passinger..."I'll be out in a minute" I rang her back to get the location of the house but the lady didn't answer.
Often the HailO app can give you the wrong location and I was not featureing on the app eithaer.
So after 10 fruitless no awnser calls I cancelled the job..
A guy who was standing there jumped in and we were on the way when she called me baack..

Why she didn't awnser before is beyond me...



Mostly things woek fine, perhaps I will solve the mystery some day.

Nightmare trip.

From the Irish Indapendent.

Men who beat taxi driver over €26 fare avoid jail

A taxi driver and choir singer was forced to cancel an audition with the RTE choir after two young men punched and kicked him around the head over a €26 fare.

Feargal MacEoin  suffered “huge mental and physical scarring” as a result of a “gratuitous” attack by James Murphy (20) and Dean Daly (19).
Both men avoided a prison term after Judge Mary Ellen Ring suspended a sentence of three years. She said she had to have regard to their youth and the fact that neither has any previous convictions. She described the assaults as a “shocking and unprovoked attack”.
Murphy of Alderwood Rise, Springfield, Tallaght and Daly of Maplewood Park, Tallaght both pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to assault causing harm at Alderwood Place, Tallaght on April 28, 2012 and to robbery of a mobile phone, a wallet and cash during the same incident.
Mr MacEoin picked up the men outside a bar by O'Connell Bridge near Dublin city centre and they asked to go to Tallaght. The driver asked them if they needed to stop at an ATM but the men said they didn't.
When they arrived at their destination one man said they needed to go inside to get the fare from his mother and the taxi driver asked them to leave a mobile phone with him for security.
The pair became aggressive and abusive and Mr MacEoin telephoned the gardai. When the driver tried to restrain one of them, Daly held him in a headlock and started punching him in the face.
He knocked the driver to the ground and both men began kicking him around the head. They continued to shout aggressively at him and took his phone and wallet.
The men fled and threw the stolen items away. They were identified on CCTV footage recorded in the taxi and arrested the same day.
Mr MacEoin was knocked unconscious. When gardai arrived they found him on the ground in a semi-conscious state and bleeding profusely from the mouth.
Some of his front teeth were knocked out and he suffered fractures around the eye area of his face.
He had to get metal plates surgically inserted into his face and told Judge Ring that his singing has suffered as a result of the attack.

He had previously been a member of the RTE choir for over four years and was trying to re-join at the time of the assault. He cancelled an upcoming audition after the assault and failed a later one.

The court heard that Mr MacEoin has also lost €18,000 in earnings since the assault and is now nervous working the taxi at night. His relationship with his children has suffered because he didn't want to talk about what happened to him.

Garda James Ward told Marie Torrens BL, prosecuting, that neither man has any previous convictions.

He accepted that Daly has shown genuine remorse and that this wasn't a premeditated assault.

The court heard Daly comes from a respectable family who are traumatised by his actions. He was extremely drunk on the night.

Sarah Jane O’Callaghan BL, defending Daly, said he co-operated with gardai and helped them retrieve the stolen wallet with all the cash. She handed in a number of “glowing” testimonials including one from former Dublin footballer Paul Curran.

Counsel said her client is now working as a barber in Dundrum.

Ronan Prendargast BL, defending Murphy, said his client is extremely sorry for the attack and is hoping to get a job as an apprentice carpenter.

Judge Ring ordered Daly to pay €2,000 in compensation to the victim over the next year. Daly previously paid €5,000 over as a token of his remorse.

The judge ordered Murphy, who is unemployed, to pay another €500 on top of €1,500 he has already paid.

Justice will never be done until the thugs are given the treatment they deserve.

I would doubt that they would have been caught without the CC TV footage.

There is another case before the courts where a taxi driver died when he hit his head on the curb when he fell back after being punched. 

That guy also walked free as he had shown remorse! 
Not much good for his widow and kids.

30 years ago

Time is like a road sign.

"It CAN'T BE THAT FAR" etc.

How did it happen?,

A stroke of time ago was the 30 th anniversary of Derry bloody Sunday.
How could the British army plan to open fire on unarmed protesters?

Then after several investigations we find out that in fact that they really did kill all those people in cold blood.

30 years ago




Then Luke Kelly gone for 30 years!



I once asked to touch the piano belonging to Phil Coulter who wrote this song.
I got my wish.
The woman who was there was so happy for me.
(I don't know if it was his wife or his housekeeper.)
He lived in Bray.
A great thrill for me even now to have touched that great piano on which such great music was written


I was with my son the other day.
When I said that it was comforting  to see the road signs in miles as we crossed the border (we have gone metric) my son asked me to watch this.