Visitors and Fish Soup

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A floating luxuary city leaves Dublin


Inside the GPO





You know when you are driving a taxi around even when things are normal your emotions can run like a helter skelter ride, up and down rising like a rocket and falling like a stone.

I started off my day easy enough picking up a Polish girl who is a regular, then it was 3 drug addicts with a young kid trying to buy heroin. They were really very fond of each other and when we made contact by fone with their dealer, the mother got out to do the buying. "Tell him you're pregnant and you can't walk far." said the other girl who stayed on in the car. Drug dealers are very wary who they deal with, there has been so many stings and arrests.
The girl who stayed on in the car was hugging the kid and she told him that when he got bigger that she would be his girlfriend and they would all be happy living together.Poor kid living in a junkies den, the whole situation is a sorry mess.

People at the top have ranches in Spain and they own rental properties and bars over there. They do not think for a second about the thousands of lives they destroy through the drug dealing.
Years ago a dealer told me he was just providing a service, they would buy it anyhow without me.
Every taxi driver feels like the guy in the movie "Taxi driver"
Some days you just wish you had a gun to even up the score a little.

Then I was heading down through Inchacore and got a run to Ballyfermot, she looked like an addict who was well on the mend, she spoke about this and that and she told me about a time she had been raped by a guy who gave her Rohipnol in her drink. She was a tough girl and she nearly killed him when she regained her senses.
The fear of aids,VD or pregnancy was horrendous.
The trial took a lot out of her she told me, the fear of infection has started to leave her now. She met a new fella recently, "The best man in the World" and she has great hopes for the future.

You can understand how a taxi driver might have little sympathy for people blow up small problems way out of proportion.

The royal visit will soon be over.
Thank God.


The speeches were good."We cannot change the past, but we can together forge a better future"
So it a new dawn in both our histories.


England and Ireland are big trading partners.
WE do more trade with each other than England does with. Brazil, India China and one other country combined, that's a lot of business.

Stuck in traffic for hours during the visit, we all were.
Her Royal highness has an exclusion zone of of around 1/2 a mile around her entourage, really over the top.
What I do object to is the way things have been planned.
You are inching down a road and you see traffic coming back the other way, so you think the road is open. Only another taxi driver recognised me and told me that the traffic coming back was the same cars going up the road to be turned back down again a mile ahead.
Now even a child would put up a notice "Road closed ahead".

There was a big football match yesterday a well 2 teams from Portugal Uefa Europa League Final FC Porto beat SC Braga 1-0.
I had 2 guys from New Jersey USA trying to get back to their hotel.
Well when I knew things would be hopeless I turned off the meter. Good guys they were they doubled the €10 that I said I would leave it at, we had a good talk while we inched our way through the traffic.
Portugal and Spain are in a very bad way financially. I suppose we all are really.
Except for the people who caused this mess, they are buying trophy homes in Boston and the Bahamas. In their wives name to be sure.

Visitors are like fish soup, after 3 days they begin to stink and need to be thrown out.

So I will leave you with this thought.
Believe in yourself....and everything is possible