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Galway is a city renowned the world over as a city of true Irish culture, music and tradition. Some years back, Galway was the fastest growing city in Europe and has since moved itself up a gear to being Ireland’s third largest city, on the basis of population, with Limerick slipping to fourth position. Galway is a young city with approximately sixty-percent of its population under the age of forty years. It’s a vibrant city with a sizable sum of blue-chip companies employing the bulk of the city’s workforce. Galway has its own University, an Institute of Technology and is a huge learning centre for young and old spanning the generations. Galway is also a city with some of the newest housing solutions, with many more new housing estates being built every year.

But Galway has a massive cancerous wound in its population boom – traffic. The situation is being exaggerated more and more each day as the rapidly expanding suburban outlay of the city adds more capacity and increases the flow of cars onto the city’s streets. This phenomena is now crippling the city that so many know of as the pedestrian Mecca that it is. Or at least, that it used to be.

I’ve lived here for over four years, and in that time I’ve watched the city grow outwards and inwards. As the growth in population accelerated, the city slowly started to lose shape and consistency. In a city where one might meet an acquaintance every few hundred meters, now it is rare that I even frequent the streets of the medieval city. The problem again is the overbearing traffic flows and the poor infrastructure that ties the old and new city together.

Galway now has some of the worst traffic in Ireland that I’ve ever seen.  The problem is tumultuously affected by the narrow streets, poor road surfaces, inadequate parking facilities, bad planning and an increasingly bad driving culture. I speak only of course of the stress-induced driving that is causing so many accidents on our roads, due to many factors such speed, alcohol, drugs and complete and total disregard for the rules of the road and a vague understanding of how to drive in traffic queues.

However in my opinion, the largest problem facing this wonderful city is the increasingly worry some amount of articulated, rigid and construction vehicles in the city. Busses too have a part to play in this compounding problem and so do sports utility vehicles (SUVs). The main issue with large vehicles such as articulated trucks in Galway is that the streets are so narrow and cars are recklessly abandoned on the pavement causing a backup of traffic due to large vehicles trying to over-take parked cars and manoeuvre through the remodelled street layouts and junctions. They are the lifeline to the city’s businesses, but they are crippling the quality of life for the population.

There is a case also for the sheer volume of vehicles on the road, with most cars having only one passenger, usually the driver. However it is an independence need that people must fill to have their own method of transport, and this is mainly unique to Ireland. One of the major problems facing Ireland in the near future is the total lack of adequate, properly planned, efficient and affordable public transport. This in large part is due to the evil workings of the nationwide cancer that is Trade Unions.

I would plead with the city officials in Galway to put in place a progressive, rigorous and vicious plan to improve the city’s traffic problems, but the fact is they aren’t that bothered (because if they were, we wouldn’t have a problem). They would most likely commission a multi-million euro report into the issue and plan for the future, a process that would take approximately six years before the complicated upgrade would begin. And even then, the problem may have exploded into unnatural proportions.

But this traffic problem is affecting more than the citizens, it’s affecting business too. If I want to go to the post office at lunch time, it would take me approximately one hour to get there and back (assuming that I don’t go between 1pm and 2pm because they close for lunch!). If I were to require some banking services, I would need to allocate another hour. Should I wish to do some grocery shopping at a reasonably-priced establishment I would need to wait until 7:30pm and not hope to return before 9:00pm.

It’s getting worse every day. I welcome solutions (particularly those that involve banning ‘L’ drivers from city streets!)

diarmy

RTÉ (Raidó Teilifís Éireann) is the national broadcaster in the Republic of Ireland. It’s a station that has been with natives of the country for almost 45 years. It’s had some ups and downs, but on the whole, RTÉ is a station that serves the role of Public Service Broadcaster in Ireland. From humble beginnings as Teilifís Éireann in the 1960s, RTÉ now encompasses 2 dedicated 24-hour channels, aptly named RTÉ One and RTÉ Two. RTÉ has no less than 4 radio channels at its beck and call, with one channel splitting into two at night time. RTÉ is an all-round achiever in public media broadcasting, servicing the commercial needs of Irish and International advertisers with its ever-expanding advert-breaks that now adorn the station’s every façade. RTÉ has a gargantuan sports department which covers all the major Irish sports (i.e. GAA) and all of the major International sports (i.e. British Premier League Football, and the occasional Formula One action.)

So RTÉ is an all-round station that keeps Irish people informed of what’s happening in the world. Or so that was the story in the 1970s and 1980s, before Irish people worked themselves out of poverty, before a Fianna Fáil led Government gave birth to the Celtic Tiger, before Aer Lingus made air travel affordable, before Ryanair made air travel cheap, before Americans swarmed the island in search of leprechauns, before Fungi was a success and long after Mayo won an All-Ireland. But since all that, RTÉ has found itself in something it never envisaged… competitive economic markets. RTÉ always had it easy in the early days. Someone in Montrose had a television in a room and watched BBC (the British Broadcasting Corporation) television all day, and he was in charge of developing ideas for the programming on RTÉ. It was no coincidence that many programmes on RTÉ looked and sounded like inexpensive versions of BBC’s programming. But since the advent of Rupert Murdoch’s world domination scheme called Sky, RTÉ has become less and less important in the eyes of its countrymen and women, because now we know what other countries are up to.

As the Celtic Tiger grew up, Ireland afforded itself some style, sophistication, cosmopolitan traits and a strong will to do better. RTÉ meanwhile still had the same man locked in a room watching television looking for inspiration, only now, the television was dim from old-age and his eyes weren’t what they used to be. And so came the decline in televisual programming that led to the establishing of a programme few in Ireland see the point of - Fair City. Glenroe, a prime-time televisual treat was axed as more and more rubbish Dublin-based drama emminated from the affluent neighbourhood-based National Broadcaster.

One facet of Irish life however that RTÉ helped to shape, is our huge and unfounded craving for news. RTÉ News isn’t a new invention, but its delivery is something that isn’t exactly steeped in history. Before the Sky and BBC era in Ireland, RTÉ put a man with a cigarette presenting some news that had been read in the paper that day. It worked, because no-one did much travelling to the various parts of the island the news was emminating from to know any different. But as the Celtic Tiger (let’s call it Síbín) had its first growls, RTÉ realised that this was not enough. So a newsroom was fashioned out of some red-brick and some canvas, chipboard and toilet rolls. Some presenters were wheeled in, and the whole thing got mature.

Throughout the last 15 years, RTÉ News has remodelled itself pretty much every 3 years. Its looks and asiprations were all driven from various parts of the programming that man in the room saw on his darkened black and white television set. By far the best redesign was the 1999 set, which came in the aftermath of the Eurovision Song Contest wins that Ireland achieved in the 1990s (winning 5 times in a row!). It was so good in fact, that I’m going to offer a link to a site to download the opening titles at the bottom of this blog. But moving on, which RTÉ are not used to, was something that never really took hold in the station. Throughout the 1990s we saw the emergence of Bryan Dobson, Eileen Dunne, Una O’Hagan and Anne Doyle. These became news anchors in their own right, and since then we’ve seen Sharon Ní Bheoláin and Aengus MacGrianna come into the limelight.

RTÉ this week changed their news room for the second time in the 21st century. Many agree that this re-design is the worst in recent history. Personally, I think it’s the worst ever. Examine the link below and go through the designs from the past, and you’ll agree that this latest relaunch adds nothing to the news. In fact, looking back at what’s gone before, it’s very difficult to see what exactly has changed apart from the set. For me, News is all about the story being told and the way it’s told. With the competitive environment that has come about in Ireland thanks to Sky and BBC and ITV, RTÉ News is slipping behind. It’s a bit out of date, completely out of touch with Irish modern life, bland and too politically correct for its own good. RTÉ rarely takes risks, doesn’t invest in any programming to benefit Irish education (unlike the BBC) and continuously churns out 5th-rate programming of the lowest quality in an attempt to fob it off as ‘the best that we can do’.

The latest RTÉ news service attempts to take the viewer into another room of their home. By adorning the studio with brown and cream, a worktop-like news desk and warm lighting, RTÉ seem to think that Irish people will be more welcoming of their news service when it breaks into their homes across the airwaves. But what RTÉ is missing, is quite frankly the point. Irish people are not children to be led by the hand up the stairs and reassured that there are no monsters under the bed. Irish people are clever, intelligent, outgoing, visually striking and vocal people. We have a culture that is vibrant and loved the world over. We have great attention to detail and a fascination with deconstructing everyday things into their basic fundamentals and talking at length about their constituent parts. We are a highly-political nation with a great love for a good argument. We’re opinionated and are one of the only nations in the world who do not live seperately from our leaders. We love sport, music, drama, news, discovery and chat. We are a nation who have also built half the world’s cities, and are the only nation in the world that is in every nation in the world (in the form of our beloved ‘Irish Pubs’). We are also one of the least-populated nations in the world, but we are world leaders in Gross Domestic Product per Capita and have some of the best land and weather in the world.

So I find it insulting that RTÉ, our national broadcaster, would serve our nation up the gruel that it did on Monday last. Our news is as much a part of our culture as our heritage and music is. But instead, RTÉ decided to take inspiration from the BBC again and from ITV. They decided to destroy our national news service with out-of-date home furnishing colours, a poor-quality presentation package, awful terrible music and an even worse introduction set of graphical titles. RTÉ news was once an Irish creation. The BBC has some of the best news coverage and presentation in the world, and RTÉ can’t come close to copying them - but the never stop trying. The man in the room with the television sadly passed away some time ago, because this latest idea is the creation of a young ‘guy’ from an easy-going Síbín-developed lifestyle that has led him to believe that this is what Ireland needs. When in fact the time has come for Ireland to recieve a 24hour news channel. We are a nation that thrives on information and given that we have a population of almost 5 million, we are also a nation that has more newspaper titles per capita than anywhere else in the world.

Please RTÉ, listen to the people of Ireland. Because very soon, you may just be privatised, and then my friend, you will fade into the sunset you so disgustingly put before us as we wait for our Six O’Clock news to begin.

diarmy

Link: The TV Room

Americans. Everyone loves Americans. They have great time for the Irish, have great faith in genealogical White Houses and love their food. But when they come to Ireland, very often they call into the worst-run business in Ireland – Dublin Airport.

Unlike other airports around the world, Dublin International Airport seems to have a special way of dealing with travellers. The layout for example, seems to be planned upon the back of a cigarette box one afternoon in a bar with three Irish men, after a few Jamesons. Conspiracy theorists would have you imagine the route from arrivals to departures and back again to be lined with video cameras, providing the powers-that-be a great day’s entertainment as they watch customers running through one of the world’s finest examples of bad planning just to make a connecting flight.

Everything about the airport shudders with years of over-capacity use and constant maintenance. The airport sees millions of travellers pass through its minefield of check-in desks, security gates and boarding doors every year, and is one of the best examples of bad feng shui in the known universe.

For one thing, Dublin Airport is too small. We all know that, and yet it’s still running to capacity 18 hours a day with literally hundreds of mis-connected flights each day due to poor location geography.  Recently, the DAA (Dublin Airport Authority, a ‘new’ body in charge of running the Airport) extended one of the landing gates and subsequently changed all the gate numbers. Now people must walk an extra kilometre to get to their boarding gate, through a selection of the cheapest in pre-fabricated buildings that government money can buy. All of it took approximately a year to build, and in a year’s time it’ll all be gone.

What really ‘grinds my gears’ about the pre-fab though, is how long it is – unnecessarily long. It was supposed to be used for Ryanair passengers, but seeing as how everyone but Aer Lingus can now land at the proper airport stands, the national carrier has to now occasionally pull in at the new ‘wing’ of the airport. This doesn’t make any sense, as Aer Lingus are one of Europe’s most-delayed airlines, as seen in a Ryanair cross-comparison report in 2005.

On my return from Düsseldorf last Friday, as I lounged around the spacious new airport terminal in Duisburg, we were informed of our late departure due to a late inbound aircraft from Ireland. Nothing new to me, I’ve been stuck for 2 hours in Paris in the past by an Aer Lingus jet that took its sweet time coming to the French capital. The national airline of the Irish Republic seemingly requires 40 minutes to turn around an aircraft at an airport, double the time of the similarly-proportioned Boeing craft operated by Michael O’Leary’s Ryanair. That told, once boarding an Aer Lingus jet, you’re greeted by classical music over the PA system, cool air-conditioned interiors, friendly perky faces from the flight crew and warm words from the deck. You may also need to search exhaustively for traces of people ever being on that craft.

Flying out of Düsseldorf, we were delayed on the runway for 15 minutes due to thunderstorms overhead, and this coupled with the late pull-off from the gate meant I’d missed my connecting flight by a few minutes (going by standard protocol of course). But the captain and first officer that night pushed the Airbus A320 as hard as they could, and losing but 30 minutes overall, we landed perfectly in a miserable Dublin airfield. Taxiing toward the airport terminal building, I got a shiver when I realised that we were turning left toward the dreaded pre-fab. This would add an extra 7 minutes onto my cross-over to our regional airline Aer Arann.

Arriving at the end of the long and ridiculously narrow corridor, listening to nothing but the sound of my feet reverberating off the plywood floors, I heard the call for the final passenger to board my lovely escapist flight to Galway. Through the queue at the seemingly non-sentient immigration inspectors, down the steps into the baggage hall, which swells with people desperate to get their kitchen sinks from the belly of their respective aircraft. This place would remind you of a cattle-mart in the late 1980s in Ireland, full of people wandering around with kids on trolleys, looking vacantly at the bare minimum of information on the airports array of ancient screens powered by ancient Windows NT 4 technology. Through the arrivals hall and the flurry of activity from people dying to see their long lost relatives, who love nothing more than standing in the way of people with lives to live and flights to catch. Up the escalator to the first floor departures area, a quick glance on the board to see if Aer Arann’s check-in desk had moved along with everything else in the airport of late. As I approached the vacant desks and the beautiful blonde behind it, I begged passage aboard my connecting flight, now 20 minutes from departure. No go. To add salt to an already sweaty wound, I was informed I could have checked into my flight from the airside part of the departures wing, a section of airport I only passed through some minutes before – before the perspiration covered my facial orifices.

And all of this in a few short minutes. Dublin Airport prides itself on its new website, its extra staff wearing pink tee-shirts who’re supposed to offer information (but actually know nothing!) and their ability to provide for connecting travellers.

In 2006, the Irish Government secured a deal to build a second terminal at Dublin Airport. We don’t need that. In fact, we, the Irish people, don’t need an airport in Dublin at all. It’s in a terrible location, with no supporting infrastructure, no interconnected public-transport, no proper information, facilities, seating, internet access or even proper shops. We, the Irish people need to see the DAA stripped of their titles, flung in the ghoulag that is Mountjoy for treason against the people of Ireland, and our national airport located to Cork, or Athlone. I say Cork because they’ve successfully opened their brand-new terminal. And I say Athlone because it’s the geographical centre of Ireland. Anywhere but Dublin.

A word to my International readers – don’t make any plans beyond landing in Ireland if you’re coming through Dublin Airport. Bring a phone, a phrasebook and a sober head. Make for the Exit and take the first form of private transport you can see… head towards the M50 and take any of the western routes away from Dublin and enjoy your visit. Better yet, call your airline and re-schedule to land at Shannon or Cork!

diarmy

Banjax
(verb) To break or to damage. Usually implies that the damage was done through incompetence rather than malice. Adjective: banjaxed.

Begrudgery
A peculiar disease of the Irish which seemingly renders them unable to to feel good about the success of their fellows. As soon as some Irish man or woman makes a name for themselves at home or abroad, the mutterings start: “Of course, everyone really knows how s/he really got their money.”

Blarney - Bullshit.

Bogger, bog-man, bog savage, bog-trotter - see culchie

Cause, the
Refers to the aim of the Republican movement, i.e. the political unification of the island of Ireland.

Culchie
Unrefined individual from a rural background

Colleen
From the Irish, cailín: young woman, girl. A perfectly normal Irish word that Irish Americans have unaccountably turned into a first name.

Craic
Fun, possessed of an exciting, convivial, high-spirited atmosphere. “Were you at the hooley in Mickser’s house last week? The craic was only mighty!”

Cute
Often used to mean `sly’ rather than `good-looking’ in Ireland. See cute whoor.

Cute whoor
Irish person, usually male and from a rural background, whose gombeen antics has drawn some grudging admiration from the speaker.

Deadly
(adj.) Great, wonderful– similar to English “wicked”.

Dublin
The capital and largest city in Ireland. The Dubliners, for their part regard the inhabitants of the rest of the country as a shower of slope-browed culchies and cute whoors, interested only in drinking poteen, pulling strokes, and having carnal knowledge of livestock and close blood relatives.

Eejit
Irish pronunciation of `idiot’. See gobshite

Feck
General-purpose Irish swear word popularised abroad by Father Ted.

Fella
A person of the male sex. Usually qualified, e.g. “young fella”, “oul’ fella”. “The young fella” refers to the speaker’s boyfriend or son, while “the oul’ fella” refers to her husband or his or her father.

Fine thing
An attractive man or woman. See ride

Flootered
see drunk.

Galway
City in the west of Ireland. Galway is smaller than either Dublin or Cork. Popular weekend destination for hordes of drinkers.

Gansey-load
Lots, plenty. Gansey– properly geansaí– is the Irish word for a jumper/ sweater/ pullover/ whatever. Apparently dates back to the rare oul’ times when young gasoors would raid orchards; a gansey-load of apples was the amount one could carry by turning up the front of one’s jumper to make a sort of pouch.

Gasoor, gasoon, garsoon
Young boy. From the Irish word garsún meaning “boy”, possibly derived originally from the French word garçon.

Gobshite
Stupid person. The Irish language has quite a staggering number of colourful and inventive words for describing the mentally inept. It’s a sort of specialisation, like the Eskimo language that has sixty words for `snow’; the Irish, having so many idiots in their midst, needed a large number of words to catalogue the gradations of galloping stupidity and imbecility exhibited by their countrymen

Hooley
A loud and particularly riotous party or celebration. Apparently, the word isn’t Irish at all; it’s Hindustani.

Hurling
Hurling involves two teams of fifteen very large culchies beating the crap out of each other with large sticks for 70 minutes.

Jar
Alcoholic drink. “A jar” refers to a single drink (e.g. “Will you have a jar with me?”), whereas “the jar” refers to alcoholic drink in general (e.g. “that fella has a fierce graw for the jar”)

Kerry
County in the south-west of Ireland that figures highly on the average Dubliner’s hate-list. Most Irish jokes told abroad are told in Ireland about Kerrymen.

Knacker
Originally, a person who deals in horses, particularly those in the horse trade responsible for converting old horses into fertiliser and adhesives. Nowadays, the term has lost all descriptive meaning and has become a generic term of abuse for anyone the speaker a) has a problem with and b) considers a good few rungs down the social ladder from themselves, e.g. Northside scumbags and Our Friends In The Travelling Community.

Knacker Drinking
Illegal open-air drinking, usually by underaged brats, in public parks, waste ground, along rivers and canals, etc. or legal aged “adults” sneaking naggins of Huzzar into the local pub so they don’t have to pay €4 for a vodka and white, instead just ordering a coke….

Langer
Penis OR stupid person. Popular term down Cork way.

Langered, langers
Drunk.

Mighty
Excellent, brilliant.

Ossified
see drunk

Our friends in the travelling community
Ironic term for the Travellers, an ethnic minority in Ireland, who live in caravans and move from place to place (generally moved on by irate homeowners).

Plastered
see drunk

RA, the
Short for IRA, the Irish Republican Army, a nationalist paramiltary group responsible for a lot of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Often heard in the phrase `up the RA!’, a phrase often shouted by the same sort of people who sing rebel songs.

Rat - arsed
see drunk

Ride
(verb) To copulate, have sex
(noun) An act of sexual intercourse. Heard in the traditional chat-up line: “I suppose a ride is out of the question?”
(noun) A sexually-attractive person, male or female. “Jaysus, that young wan is a right little ride.”
Note to visiting Americans: what you call a “ride”, we call a “lift”. Use of the word “ride” while in Ireland will only lead to much merriment at your expense.

Scabby leg
As in, “He/she would lick whisky off a scabby leg.” Said of a person whose appetite for alcohol exceeds all bounds of taste and decorum.

Scuttered
see drunk.

Scutters, the
A case of diarrhoea.

Shifting
Generic term for all manner of amorous activities, ranging from what the Americans like to call `heavy petting’ to full penetrative sex, depending on where in Ireland the speaker is from. Any use of the word in a conversation among a group of Irish people from different parts of the country is likely to sidetrack the whole conversation into a long, boring argument over the “correct” meaning of the word, with each person expounding at length why the particular meaning of the word in his/her city, town, village, parish, or clan is the One True Meaning Of Shift.

Slapper
A female scumbag.

Spondulicks
Money

Tinker
Originally meant an itinerant tinsmith, the word has lost all descriptive meaning and is now used as an entirely derogatory term for Our Friends In The Travelling Community. See also knacker.

Troubles, the
Mild euphemism for the ongoing murder, terror, mutilation, and intimidation taking place in Northern Ireland. The Irish seem to have a good line in such understatement– World War II was “the Emergency” to us.

Wagon
Annoying or unpleasant woman.

Whoor
Irish pronunciation of `whore’. Can be used for both male and female persons.

Yer man, yer wan
Person whose name has slipped the speaker’s mind or whose identity is evident from the context of the conversation. Example: “I was talking to your man in the pub last night; you know: your man! Your man with the leg on him [i.e. a person with a limp]” A feature of Dublin speech that most foreigners find infuriating