Herring days

Docklands, part of the new Dublin


Hatch St, steel and glass.


Ireland on the move!


The movers are emptying the office of the taxi regulator.
I wonder how many millions of Euro that office has wasted.

"Herring days"an expression from the London people who when times were hard they had to eat fish as there was no money to buy meat.


How was it for you?

Well the rugby was a classic example of what happens if you don't play right to the very end of the game.
Ireland were ahead and the Welsh slammed in a try in the dying minutes to win.


The economy still has me beaten though.
I heard today that the management style of Brussels is of the "Seagull style" They swoop in from nowhere, flap around all over the place,do nothing, then go away again leaving shit and feathers all over the place.

Brother believe me when I say this to you.

The Greeks can't pay and the Greeks won't pay.

Followed by the Portuguese, Spanish Irish and the Italians.

Try to find out what happened in Argentina when the money collapsed, and Iceland not long ago.

One thing for sure is that if I am asked to pay back a debt which some multi Billionaire who lived in Dublin 4 ran up.

I totally refuse to do it.

Even though Government ministers and other politicians were totally involved in the scams which brought us here, is all the more reason not to pay.

It is not my personal debt, so why should you or I be asked to pay ?.

Have a look at the content here.
There is content here which will point you in a somewhat different direction.


There was a thing in the paper which shows how low the quality levels of journalism have now fallen to here in Ireland.
A Polish girl living here wrote an article for a Polish newspaper in which she spoke about living on the dole and the beauty of Ireland and what a delight it was to live in Doneagal beside the seaside where she could walk for miles along deserted beaches at dawn and so on.

Well an article appeared in the Irish Independent newspaper which was supposed to be a translation of the piece. There was sections where she was calling Ireland a "Shit hole" and all very negative stuff.
Then the Polish ambassador came on and translated vast sections of her article which told of her love for this fantastic country and its friendly people.
The Polish girl herself came on and spoke about her article.
Polish girls article bore no resemblance to the article written by the Irish Independent journalist whatsoever.
I do wish that the reporter who "made up"the story was brought was in to explain her racist slanderous article.


Years ago in the year 2000 at the height of the boom Manchester United signed a lease for the MU shop.
The rent was €507,000 per year and the shop and "Reds" bar closed 16 months later.
But the lease was for 15 years and the bar which now operates on the site is paying €340,000 in rent leaving €167,000 loss to the football club until 2015.
It will take a lot of football jumpers to pay for that mistake.
Still they were a bit silly to think that Irish people would pay €15 for a mug or €50 for a clock.

One of my first people today was a guy from Kansas city working with Yahoo. With Google,Facebook, Microsoft,Ebay,Intel and Paypall we are world leaders at the coal face of Internet technology.
But be warned we are only in the lead because we offer these companies a better tax rate than they can get elsewhere in Europe.One thing for sure is that Europe would love to make an level playing field for business within Europe, increasing our corprate tax level would do it and it will be a very bad day for us if that happens.

The Welsh are here.

Today the Welsh dragon flag is flying all over Dublin.

Rugby



A Welsh Male voice choir.



A nice bit of a brass band and you're home with Cathrine Zeta Jones and her grandfather Tom!


I will admit that the pride the Welsh have for language and country has to be admired.

Just one more thing to share with you.

My friend and neighbour Mabel has a landmark birthday today

102 and going strong.

Wrong taxi ?

Lir, our college of the preforming arts.


A fine vintage Merc with a ladys shoe abandoned beside it..


1880, so its been there a long time. Where is it ?


Smithfield viewing chimney.


A Cinderella carriage for hire on your wedding day.


A paper was published for discussion last week.
Among the proposals was a ban on renting taxis, or making the renter be responsible for knowing who is driving his car.
Credit cards in all taxis.
Income tax cross checks to be made of drivers.

Etc etc

Then wonders will never cease.
A swift clamp down in Westmorland St caught 6 illegal taxis in less than an hour.

On Friday things were working out for me fer sure. For the previous three days I was not well but thanks to our government incentive scheme I was able to work for a few hours in the morning. Then home again and back to bed.

If you are self employed over here you get no benefit if you are off sick, so your incentive is to work or to starve.

I had come home when I got a phone call from an insurance assessor I know.
A fire on Camden St. Could you bring me over?
There is nothing like a fire to gather the trades together.



So when I dropped him off he told me he was going to call me for a run to Malahide later.
Both together cost €60.

When you look after your customers your business should look after itself.

Around 5.30 I was rattling down Pearse St when I saw 2 girls with cases. I turned off the roof light and they hopped in.
Some people will drop you a subtle hint that they are a bit odd !
For her destination she gave a "### Terrace" as her destination, no hint as to where it might be.
But just then her phone rang.
"What do you mean? You've arrived? I'm in the taxi!"
Well I got a broadside from her tongue, things like. "You knew we were booked and you swooped in in front of the other taxi to steal his fare!"
And a lot worse.
"I was driving along with my light on, you hailed me and I turned it off."
I will not go into it but to say that I told her that she could pay me now and get out, then ask the other taxi to drive along and pick them up. But that my entire fare would be little more than what is on the meter now.
(In most country's there is a minimum charge which covers the first kilometer)
I also told her that she should have asked if I was the "speedy Cabs taxi" we booked?
And also look to see if it had their company logos all over the taxi.

An Arctic silence descended for a while, then she started giving the other girl a guided tour of our fair city. She was a visitor from Portland the USA.

I spotted that she had forgotten St.Patricks Cathedral and our Huguenot heritage.
So we arrived and I was getting out of the taxi I was taking the bags from the boot.
There was €10.50 on the meter, she put €10 into my hand and said she had no more money.
Perhaps I should have asked her guest if she had any money as her host was leaving me short.

Well I do believe that you make your own luck, the person who is up above dishing out good fortune will not smile on her actions today.

Some people might have said say something like.
"I hope your bead and breakfast arrangements are in order tax wise?,
no one is above the law when the tax man calls"

Ah well for every toxic person you meet there will be 100 positive well behaved people.

A long time ago I had a nasty piece of work who refused to pay me when I brought him home past Sandymount, he called me names, but I had the doors locked. When the idiot made a swing at me I spun the car around and he was back outside the Card Club on Merrion Square again in double quick time.
He still refused to get out of the car and the rain was coming down in sheets.
I pulled over to the Natural history meusm (dead zoo)where a garda came over.
He listned to us both, then told him to pay £6, I had only asked for £5.
Then he told him to get out of the taxi and if he could get another one he was to behave himself and pay to pay up when requested. I blew into the base at Metro via radio and told the dispatcher that the fare had refused to pay and tried to assault me. "Thanks for that 86, he's barred again"

You have to respect yourself a bit and not take bad manners.
This was the best advice I ever got from a customer one day.
"You respect your customers and are polite to them.
Accept nothing less from them"

I stopped the tsxi on 3 occasions to vacate the seats since then.
It works wonders, a big wake up call for some ignorant people who think that they can go through life bullying people.


I must be slipping about not noticeing that places are closing down all over the city.
William Searsons pub on Baggott St has closed..Then I was told that it closed before Christmas
Next thing was that I was told that the rent was too dear €8,000 per week !
You would have to serve a good few pints before you could pay for stock staff and other costs before you could show €8000 clear profit to pay the rent.

As establishments go this one was run in a "tricky" manner.

The prices crept up all night long. The tills were programmed to change every hour, you could be paying 80% extra at midnight on the price you paid at mid day.
It was being run as part of the Thomas Reid group who are in rapid decline.
For any pub to survive like they were trading the economy has to be out of control for them to survive.
Take the chain Wetherspoons in the UK for contrast. Cheap food cheap beer and a good standard of pub.
I know he buys food and beer with a short shelf life, but then again it is not long in stock until it is sold on.
We are all counting the pennies now for sure.

Imagine if this was true

Wooden sheep in Smithfield


Pheonix park is 350 years in business


Garry Rhodes restaurant is closed. A hard town to do business in.

Everywhere in this modern world workers are being made redundant and "sub contractors" on a lower wage get their jobs.

A man comes home from work and when he steps from his car he smells gas.
He asked his wife and she says it came an hour ago and she thought it would go away.
So they ring the gas company.
45 minutes later the man from the gas company arrives.
"This is far too big for me, I'll have to call up reenforcements"
So 2 hours later trucks and vans with diggers pull up ito the street.
They had cut off the electricity to the houses as a perecaution, now it was getting late.

The people in the houses had been using candles to get around their houses in the dark.

The lady in the house next door went upstairs to go to bed, with her burning candle in her hand she opened the bedroom door.
The gas had been coming in through ducts and travelled up inside the walls of the house into the room and with the flame from the candle the gas exploded the cavity wall full of gas also exploded blowing the entire front wall out of the house.

She is critical in hospital with 97% of her body burned.

So a safety inspector called to the site of the explosion!

He looks around and calls up the first guy on the scene.

Would this be what is called a first class emergency?

Defenately said the man from the gas company.

The very first thing you must do for a first class emergency is evacuate the entire area.

WHY WAS THIS NOT DONE ?

It is incerdable, but you see no one was in charge.


So you might have a cruise ship worth millions, with thousands of people on board.
The captain decides that he will sail a bit closer to the shore to wave farewell to his pal,7 other people are on the bridge .
Well he has done this before and the local coastguard didn't make much of a fuss at that time.
But now his luck was not in today and he runs on to rocks.

The staff run around like headless chickens and it is said the that the "Abandon ship" was not sounded. Staff even told passingers that "all was OK" and that they could go back to their cabins.
Crew scramlbled past passingers to get into the lifeboats.
The captain "fell" ito a lifeboat by accident while hundreds remained on board.
It was a little hard to believe his story of a fall as he had his 3 laptops and 2 mobile phones with him at the time.

One hell of a lawsuit is on the horizon now.€297million from the Americans who were on board for a start.

One other example I had from a crane driver I had a few years ago at the height of the building boom.
You need to have a driving licence to drive a crane,you have to know your loads and tolerances to lift different weights. For example you can lift 20 tonnes and move it around close to the base of a tower crane. But as you move the same load out along the boom the leverage can pull the whole crane over, wind is another factor.
So he is there minding his own business one day when a foreign lad arrives in the cab of the crane. "The boss sent me up here to learn how to drive the crane"
So my man gos to the back of the crane and removes the fuses, knocks the boom out of gear and climbs down.
He went over to the gaffer and told him he was ringing health and safety to have the site closed down.
Un qualified personell on the crane.
The site was closed until an audit of safety was done, toe boards on scaffolding, safety helmets and boots had to be put on and a promise to behave themselves in future, then they could start work again.

Could you imagine that taxis could be rented from someone from the newspaper, then the person who rents the taxi allows 3 or 4 other people to drive this taxi except no one else is insured to drive except the one who rented the taxi.
The others have no PSV licence, some of them have no licence at all.
This practice is widespread here in Dublin.
People who have no insurance to drive a car,never mind drive a taxi.
People whose past has never been checked out, drivers who have not one clue of where the villages of Dublin are.
One girl told me last night that she was going to Palmerstown and fell asleep, she was coming to Glendalough Co.Wicklow when she woke up. Lucky for her it was her boyfriend was a detective on the phone and he rang her to see if she was OK.

Lucky for her they were able to get a police car out to her home and bring in the driver to test his geography..She didn't know what happned to him.

When the enforcers pull on to the rank at Heuston to inspect the taxis 3 or 4 cars pull off the rank.

My question to the "Enforcers" is this.

Why are the rogue taxis not pulled over?

What is the point of being legal if the illegal drivers are being allowed to ply for trade with complete immunity ?

There be more Dragons

I AT LAST FOUND THE WEBSITE FOR THE CHINESE NEW YEAR CLICK HERE.



Great video ?

€1.4 Billion house.

No the house prices have not gone mad, its an art instillation.
A house made from shredded bank notes.
I was down there yesterday and couldn't find it, even though I asked a workman who was only yards from it and he knew nothing.

Today I found it.
It is in a shop at Crane Lane which is at the Liffey end of Smithfield, beside the coffey shop



Oh boy but spring is coming on quickly now, look at the lovely daffodils, they have been open since before Christmas.

On that poor guy who took a court injunction to prevent 6 newspapers from naming him wrongly in a newspaper article.
The legal costs I have heard will buy a house in any part of the country.

I would have thought that if he rang the editiors office and privided proof that then he could sue if he was libelled in the paper.

Happy new year

To all my wonderful Chinese friends.
龍年5月帶給你的祝福

Now don't make those silly mistakes tomorrow !
When you are writing a check don't write in Rabbit Its Dragon now.

Student protetests his innocence

There are video cameras everywhere,
So if someone who looks just like you does a runner in Japan you might get the blame.

Now you might be in Japan at the time yourself and get blamed "perhaps"in the wrong.

You might have to go to the high court to get an injunction ! Just to protect your good name.

From the Examiner newspaper.

Student back in High Court in bid to prevent being named in video case

Saturday, January 21, 2012 - 10:52 AM

A 22-year-old is back in the High Court today in a bid to stop six national newspapers from naming him over a video he claims defames him.

Eoin McKeogh, a student of business and Japanese at DCU, denies he is in the online video which allegedly shows a young man evading a taxi fare.

His lawyers told the High Court he was in Japan at the time.

Last week he secured an injunction against internet giants such as Facebook and Google, stopping them from rebroadcasting or publishing the material.

Following reports on the court proceedings, the 22-year-old student is now seeking an order stopping the Evening Herald, the Sunday Times, the Irish Examiner, the Independent, the Star and the Irish Times from publishing his identity.

His counsel has argued that by identifying Mr McKeogh, the newspapers have circumvented the terms and spirit of the order.


One way or another it was an expensive taxi ride for him.