The Rag has the inside track on what's been happening in Portlaoise prison.

Any motorist will have noticed the prices of petrol and diesel creeping up at the pumps in the last few weeks. Not long ago, it was easy enough to find petrol and diesel at under €1 per litre, but now the average seems to be around the €1.10-€1.12 mark.

Today, I was driving down the south quays in Dublin, when I passed the Statoil garage on Usher's Quay. This is one of the few filling stations left in the city centre, and it's a wonder that its owners, Topaz Energy hasn't sold it off yet for development into apartment blocks. Whatever their plans for it, they are charging outrageous prices for fuel there.

The bastards are charging €1.449 for both petrol and diesel. What the fuck is so special about their fuel? Maybe it's single estate, first cold pressing extra virgin petrol or something.

Imagine that you have been stuck for hours in traffic, and the quarter tank that you expected to see you through the day is now in the red. You crawl along the quays, the fuel warning light flashing. You know the next nearest filling station is out beyond the canal and you may not make it that far. So you pull into the only filling station in sight and pay well over the odds for enough to get you to the next station. Now that, my friends, is a rip-off.

My mobile is most likely to ring in any of the following scenarios:

- When it been quiet for some time, and I make a call. Or if I answer the first call to come through in hours, another call comes in.
- When I'm about to introduce myself to a prospective client when on a speculative visit.
- When I'm in the jacks.
- When I'm negotiating a mad road junction like the Magic Roundabout in Cork.
- When I'm about to eat.

A few years back, when I was driving back to Dublin from Belfast, I decided to take the [ahem] scenic route down through South Armagh. I approached a joint RUC/British Army checkpoint on a lonely backroad, and as I lowered the window at the checkpoint, the phone rang.

Does this happen to other people? Other than Father Larry Duff, I mean.

Gardens at Emo Court, Co Laois, earlier today:

Cat listening to Stevie Wonder (and some other things too.)



A hillbilly version of Motorhead's classic, The Ace of Spades:

Nissan obviously have high hopes for strong sales of this new model:



Why else would they give it a name that's pronounced "Cash Cow"?

… to Chelmsford fuck no, that's not it, Chelsea no, not there either...

[fades in] ... which managed to stay ahead by a length in the feature event at the Curragh back in February unlike Make My Day Punk the promising two year old from the Coolmore stable which fell at the last in Chepstow last week but even still he might be a decent each way at 33/1 in the Paddy Power on Wednesday or indeed you might be better off putting a few bob on the nose if the odds tighten up a bit like You're Some Tulip which started off at 50 and is now down to sixteens in the 2.15 on Tuesday starting alongside Get Off The Road Motherfucker which went to post odds-on in Punchestown last Tuesday week and was still running on Wednesday when the action had moved to Gowran Park where Get Out Of My Knickers romped home unopposed which was no surprise really as she was the only horse in the race and so couldn't lose which could well happen on Wednesday when she's in the 3.30 under Johnny Maguire who hasn't managed to win a single race all season a fact that has caused concern in the stable yard at Ballydoyle from where A Wop Bop A Loola A Wop Bam Boo Got A Girl Named Daisy She Almost Drives Me Crazy the favourite for the Champion Chase has been in intensive training for the last four months under the watchful eye of trainer Jimmy Savage the man who took us all by surprise by entering Anamewithnospaces a mare gelding into the Powers Gold Label at Leopardstown after Christmas which took both punters and bookies by surprise by winning at a canter virtually unbacked ... [fades out]

Continues ad nauseam, everywhere, for the rest of the week.

Whenever I go abroad and drive on motorways, it brings home to me just how poor the standard of motorway driving is in Ireland. The vast majority of drivers just don't get the simple rules, like stay in the inside lane and use the outside lane for overtaking only.

We went to Birmingham last weekend, and because we now have a little 'un, the €30 Ryanair option was not an option. By the time we would have checked in the travel cot and the pram, not to mention all the other necessary acoutrements that babies need, we would have faced a bill that heretofore would have safely seen my wife and I to Auckland and back. First class. So we ferried it.

Holyhead to Birmingham is dual carriageway or motorway the whole way, (going the A55-M56-M6 route.) And it was a doddle. Not once did we get stuck behind a truck doing 61 mph attempting to overtake another truck doing 60 mph. Nor did we end up in a tailback in the outside lane behind a Nissan Micra, driven by some oul biddy going "Well, as far as I'm concerned 60 mph is perfectly fast enough!"

But I get these every day on the M7/N7. Last Tuesday night, I was making my way home on an almost empty N7. I was tootling along in the leftmost lane at or about the speed limit. There was a car ahead of me and I was slowly catching up on him. As I was approaching the point where I would have to overtake, a van appeared on my shoulder in the middle lane. I stuck on my indicator to overtake the car ahead of me, expecting the van driver to either move over into the outside lane or to get his arse in gear and finish overtaking us both. But he didn't. He just stayed dawdling alongside me, and so I was forced to slow down, move in behind him and then overtake both of them in the outside lane.

The other issue I have with Irish motorway drivers concerns lights. Some people seem to think that just because you're on a motorway, you can drive with your full beams on. Or that it is acceptable to drive with fog lamps on when there is no fog.

You may have got this in an e-mail already, but if not…

RTE News 19th February 2007 8.02PM

British & Irish Governments Plan Ceremony in Croke Park

Northern Ireland Minister Peter Hain has announced details of a joint ceremony before Irelands crunch game against England in Croke Park on the 24th February.

The significance of the game is not lost on GAA followers and republicans who remember the infamous shooting of 14 players and supporters by the British Army on the 21st November 1921.

However according to GAA spokesman Ulick Magee a plan being devised by the GAA and the Northern Ireland office, will attempt to draw a line under the incident.

"We've spoken to the British government and they understand the significance of the event back in 1921. Back then 14 people were killed by British forces so in the spirit of the peace process and friendship we're proposing that we shoot 14 of their lot before the match. Then maybe have fireworks afterwards or something." Said Mr Magee.

British Government Reaction 

The plan has had a mixed reaction from Downing Street. Prime Minister Tony Blair thinks the idea has merit but said that it needs to be done properly and with dignity.

"Frankly I think its a small price to pay for progression in Anglo-Irish affairs, but I think the idea of getting Ray Houghton to do the shooting would be too much for many English fans to take particularly after his goal against us back in 1988. And he's Scottish which is worse."

Proposed Victims 

According to informed sources, the GAA and Number 10 have already drawn up a list of names for those to be shot. The list, which is not yet agreed, is thought to be a compromise of people that both the Irish and English public dislike. Among the names are moaney-hole singer James Blunt, foul mouth idiot Jade Goody, Trinny & Suzannah, Man Utd donkey Rio Ferdinand, cream cake expert Vanessa Feltz, "comedian" Russell Brand and any of the blokes who do outside broadcasts for Sky News.

But discussions took an ironic twist when both sides agreed on shooting Belfast singer Brian Kennedy, but neither side agreed on what nationality he was. GAA representatives claim he's British with their Foreign Office counterparts claiming he's Irish. The Irish claimed no Irishman should sing or dance in such a manner and the English saying he couldn't be a Brit because he had no tattoos on his forearm and didn't wear Ben Sherman shirts. However there was eventual consensus that he should be shot regardless of his nationality.

Plans agreed 

The shooting will be carried out my members of the 2nd Infantry Battalion from Cathal Brugha Barracks in Dublin. The original idea to get the FCA to carry out the executions were dropped when they revealed that their rifles are in fact made of baked-plastercine. Similarly the Garda Emergency Response Unit was discounted for fear they'd shoot more innocent civilians then claim overtime for it.

As we all know, the IFTAs were on last Friday night. I wouldn't normally take much notice of award ceremonies like this, but I had reason to be interested in this year's event. A close relation of mine was involved in a project that was up for a couple of awards, and he was there on the night.

I got a text from him late on Friday night to say that they had won one of the awards for which they were nominated, so there was great excitement altogether. On Saturday evening, I was keeping one eye on the telly as they were showing the coverage of the event. The first hour of RTÉ's coverage seemed to be all about the frocks. Various starlets showed up in their finery, and the lovely Kathryn Thomas was on hand to enquire of them as to "whom" they "were wearing."

That's fair enough, as frockery is part and parcel of any awards do. But they overdid it somewhat, to the extent that RTÉ then had to curtail its coverage of the actual awards ceremony itself. They did the whole "And the IFTA goes to…" spiel for such categories as Best Actor/Actress in a Leading Role, Best Film, etc; but for some of the other categories, the presentation of the award wasn't shown. They were treated as also-rans.

It was among these "also-ran" categories that my relation's project won its gong. The award itself was won by a group, of which he is a member. (He is the co-creator of the project, and the main scriptwriter.) They were shown for all of three seconds with their award, and because there were four of them on stage collecting the award, not all of them got into the camera shot. Guess who was just out of shot?

Most of the lovely girls on display earlier on in the coverage had nothing to do with the awards themselves. Yet the people who actually win the awards don't seem to matter.

In honour of the upcoming elections in Northern Ireland, I present my first cartoon. Hope you enjoy it!

Adds: It's a bit rough and ready, with the transitions not as smooth as I had originally designed. You may have to use the pause button, or rewind every now and then to read all the captions in full.

I only ask, because mine is shite. In the piece below, I must have made more erroneous keystrokes than correct omes. So for this entry, I am going to eschew the use of the backspace key altogether.

Somethines I start to type something adn it's as if I have grown ten thumbs. After the spacebar, I'd recon the bakspace key ids the most used eky omn my compyter. My most common tyhriock ids to press rtwo keys at once. Or the otherone id to make a mistake, and then go to hit the backspace key but hist the equals key by mistake, so I end up with somethas==ign==ng like this.

I fequently type 'and' as 'adn' or 'abd', and 'the' as 'thr'. I seem yo have a cplete blindspot for the 'L' key, as I constanyly hit either the 'k' ot the ';' key nuy mistake.

I relanny should learjk how to type properly.

When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a headline writer for a tabloid newspaper. Unfortunately, I didn't get enough points in my Leaving Cert to do tabloid headline writing, and had to do wine merchantry instead, so here I am today.

I still like to keep my hand in at the old headline writing, but one of the problems I encounter is that sometimes I think of a headline, but the story to go with it just doesn't materialise. That's never stopped a few tabloid newspapers, I suppose, though.

Anyway, the ones below the fold have been thrashing around my head for a while, so I thought that in best tabloid fashion, I'd make up the stories to go with them.

Ryanair have been in the news a bit in the last week or so (when are they ever out of it? you may ask.) Last week, the company was singled out by a British politician, criticising their environmental record. Today, they came out against the Fine Gael idea of a second airport for Dublin.

On both occasions, Ryanair spokesmen came on to The Last Word to bat for the company. On Friday it was Michael O'Leary himself, and today it was one of his underlings, whose name escapes me at this moment. As well as making their point about the main topic at hand, the discussion on both occasions got around to the issue of a rail link from Dublin city centre to the airport. You might think that Ryanair might support this proposal, but in fact they are quite trenchant in their opposition to it.



On Friday, O'Leary baldly stated that a rail link to the airport would be a waste because no-one would use it. The vast majority of people who come to Dublin airport arrive by car, he said. Today, his lackey said that international experience showed that rail links to airports are a waste of resources. Really? So no-one uses the Stanstead Express when they get off their Ryanair flight to London, then?

This is of course, utter bollocks, and reminiscent of the sort of nonsense we might have heard about air travel to and from Ireland in the days before Ryanair. Why build an airport in the bogs of Mayo, when no-one would use it? Why have flights to regional airports across Europe, when no-one would want to go there?

What are your options for getting to Dublin airport at present?

- Private car. Delays likely on the M50 or on the roads out of the city centre. Long term car park fees.

- Taxi. Expensive, and again you can get badly stuck in traffic.

- Aircoach. Probably the best option at present, and it now serves destinations well beyond Dublin city centre. But again, you are at the mercy of the traffic.

- Other buses. Second best option.

A fast rail link that would get you from the city centre to the airport in 15-20 minutes would be massively successful in my opinion. The Luas has shown us that if a good, reliable public transport service is built, people will use it.

A caller suggested that the reason why Ryanair oppose a rail link is because they get a cut off all the car-hire deals booked through their website, and that Dublin Airport has one of the biggest car-hire markets in Europe.

If you don't have broadband, then you don't get to enjoy some of the quirkier aspects of the web.

Like seeing if you can blend an iPod

There has been so much written in Irish blogs about drivers that it might seem superfluous to add anything more. But as a newly-installed resident of Laois, I feel that I should write something. Not about Laois drivers, I should stress, but those from Offaly.

Here's a short guide on how to drive in Offaly, particularly of you want to pass yourself off as a native Offalian:

- The recommended distance you should leave between yourself and the car in front should be no more than five metres, particularly on any of the backroads between the N6 and Tullamore.

- Headlights should only be dipped when you come within twenty metres of an oncoming vehicle. When you are behind a vehicle in darkness, lights should only be dipped when you have reached the recommended five metres behind the vehicle in front.

- The footpath in villages and towns is for parking on. Prams and wheelchairs don't have tax discs, do they?

- If you are male and under the age of 25, your vehicle must have at least three of these features:
a huge spoiler on the back
go-faster stripes
a reg-plate dating from 1991-1994
tinted windows
under-chassis lighting
holes bored in the silencer
the red "L" from an L-plate, with all the white border removed

- If you are male and over 25, the recommended vehicle is a Toyota Land Cruiser.

- You may park anywhere at any time, as long as you leave your hazards on.

- Should you find yourself outside of the confines of Co Offaly and on a motorway, you should drive in the outside lane only, unless of course you are a woman, in which case you should drive in the inside lane.

- You do not need to indicate if you are making a left turn, particularly if a vehicle is waiting to emerge from the road into which you are turning.

- On roundabouts, you do not have to indicate a right turn.

- Traffic lights:
Green: Go
Amber: Go faster
Red: Stop, but if they have only just gone red, floor it.

- One-way systems in car-parks don't count.

Signing off for the festive season, I'd like to wish all visitors to this site a very Happy Christmas.

And Aoife would like to wish you a Happy Christmas too:

Someone's getting into the festive spirit:

These houses are not far from us in Portarlington, and invite those who come and view them to leave a donation for Laois Hospice.

For the last month or six weeks, radio playlists have become drearily formulaic. Go into any shopping centre and you can guess what music will be playing before you set foot in the place.

OK, I admit that I'm probably a teensy bit more cynical about Christmas than most, but by Jesus, I frigging hate Christmas music. Every year, it's the same ould shite that gets dusted off and wheeled out. The greatest offenders:

Merry Christmas Everybody - Slade

I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday - Wizzard (especially the tuneless chorus sung by the kids)

Stop The Cavalry - Jonah Lewie

Wonderful Christmastime - Paul McCartney. (Jeeezus, this guy wrote Let It Be, one of the greatest songs of all time.)

Fairytale of New York - The Pogues & Kirsty McColl (I used to like this song, and it's on one of my favourite albums of all time. but I have heard it too many times by now.)

Do They Know It's Christmas - Band Aid (Yes, they probably do, if only for the fact that this dirge is played incessantly on the radio.)

Last Christmas - Wham


Thanks be to jeebus they'll soon be back in the archive where they belong.

A man who plays piano with his balls...

Thankfully, not in the sense that one might have in mind.

I have been doing a lot of driving recently, as is the case every December. In the last month or so, I have been to almost every extremity of the country, travelling on motorways, N roads, R roads and letterless roads.

The one thing I find really frustrating about driving around Ireland (apart from the shit roads) is the general shittiness of road signage. For example:

- Following signs for a place through several crossroads, junctions, etc., only to get to a T-junction with no sign. You obviously have to guess from that point on.
- Crawling around Tralee looking for the road to Limerick/Dublin, only to eventually discover that you are supposed to follow the signs for Killarney, the road for which branches off the main Limerick/Dublin road.
- Seeing a distance sign like the one at the cross in Ferns, which puts Enniscorthy at 18km away; and then seeing another one less than a km further on, which puts Enniscorthy at only 12km away.
- Falling victim to the rural sport of sign turning, where a sign is rotated 180 degrees on its post. Just for the craic, like.
- The continuing presence of distance signs in miles, at least 25 years after the decision was made to convert the whole lot to kilometres.
- Signs sited behind big trees, invisible in summer when the tree is in full leaf.
- Different spellings for the same placename.
- The N15 going north, which has several signs for Lifford, but hardly any for Letterkenny.
- Several signs mounted on the one post, all at the same level. The one you want to see is the most likely to be obscured by one in front.
- A mixture of official roadsigns, signs for tourist attractions, and even signs for private businesses sharing the same signpost.

I'd reckon this one here sums it all up:

I was scanning the headlines of the tabs in Centra on Sunday morning, and one in particular caught my eye. I think it was in The Star, and it said something like "Killer Will Go To Funeral", the jist of the story being that the killer of Marlo Hyland will be in the congregation of his funeral, to pay his respects to the man he dispatched to oblivion.

This got me thinking - how would a priest go about the funeral of a gangland killer? Anyone who believes in Heaven and Hell would surely expect that when a scumbag like Hyland steps on the celestial elevator, he's can only go in one direction - down. Every funeral I have ever been to has the priest commending the soul of the departed into the loving embrace of Himself Upstairs. How could a priest do that in the case of Hyland or someone like him, knowing that the person who used to inhabit the corpse in front of him was a murdering, thieving, drug-dealing, misery-spreading bastard?

I can't remember exactly where I heard this - I think it could have been on Today FM.

Construction workers building the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh find a network of copper wires buried several metres below Holyrood. Archaeologists examine the find and come to the conclusion that the ancient Scots had an advanced telephone system in prehistoric times.

Workmen in London find a deeply buried network of fibre-optic cables during excavations for the new Olympic Stadium. Archaeologists confirm that prehistoric Londoners had a sophisticated high-speed telecommunications network at their disposal.

Deep excavations at the Port Tunnel site in Dublin unearth neither copper wires nor fibre optic. Archaeologists conclude that the ancient Irish communicated using mobile phones and wireless broadband.

...you see an unattended BMW 320 outside a Centra with its engine running, as I saw this morning. That would last about 0.4 seconds in Dublin.

...your local corner shop doesn't stock The Irish Times, but they have all the British tabloids.

...you can pull up on a double-yellow line outside the bank, go in and arrange a mortgage, safe in the knowledge that you won't get a ticket.

...shops close for lunch every day, at 1pm on a Saturday, and for a half day Wednesday.

The Sunday Turbine ran a piece today in their magazine entitled The Fifty Most Uncool People. For some reason, they managed to leave out the ultra-wooden celebrity cook Rachel Allen.

Oh, hang on, she's their cookery writer, isn't she?

On the face of it, Threshers, the biggest chain of off-licences in the UK would appear to have been caught out by its own web carelessness.

On the company's website, an offer was made to suppliers to avail of a special 40% discount, by using a special coupon that could be downloaded. It appears that more people that they planned got wind of this, and about 800,000 vouchers have been downloaded, and the company will have no choice but to honour them if presented in any Thresher shop.



A Thresher spokesperson said that the 40% discount "could hit the company's profit margins". 

Could??? Thresher must be working on considerably fatter margins now than when I was working for them back in the early 90s. But if they are, maybe they planned this to happen. Lots of publicity, loads of punters, and maybe even a slim profit margin as well.

OK, so you like wine. And you like dogs.

Put the two together and you get ... Winedogs

I know this is not genuine, but it's funny anyway:

I thought this Lotto ticket was a bit odd when I saw it first. It's a Quick Pick, with the first, second, third and sixth numbers on the two lines the same. (I've made a couple of very subtle changes to it, just in case anyone thinks they can pass it off as genuine.)


Sadly, there is no prize for this type of coincidence, only the one where the numbers on your ticket match those drawn from the drum. 

Bastards.

Many, many years ago, when the downy fuzz on my teenage face became plentiful enough to warrant the use of a razor, the twin blade razor was an exotic tool. My older brothers (those without full beards) used single blade disposables. My dad used a "safety razor", which came apart and used replaceable blades.

For a while, I was an early adaptor in the razor market. As soon as a new razor with another blade (to shave you closer still) or a lubricating strip swooshed onto the market, I was there to be at the cutting edge, so to speak.

I gave up when they started putting batteries in razors. By that time, razors had become like inkjet printers - a small initial investment for the main equipment, but then the consumables required thereafter cost an absolute fortune. I now use a twin-blade razor I bought in Aldi a couple of years ago, where I can get replacement blades for a couple of €s per pack.

Now, Gillette have released a five-blade razor called the Fusion (Warning: link involves quite a bit of Flash and lots of swooshing.) Dear God, how may more blades will they continue to add? What will our grandsons and great-grandsons use to shave? Fifteen-blade razors?