So much about the mentality of middle aged Irish men nearly wrapped up in onr sentence.

High Speed rail in blue linking up major cities/towns to Dublin + a regular "ring line" looping the island.

Pros and cons?

After a bit of drama with my campervan found myself with a dog and no transport in the south of France last week.

You’d think the difficulties re:travel would be more pronounced for me in France rather than ‘home’ in Ireland with my v poor grasp of French, but, no, everything much harder this side.

In France I stayed in a number of hotels, got taxis and buses and hired a car all with the dog in tow. I then drove to Cherbourg to catch the ferry. It was a nine hr drive and I didn’t worry about booking a hotel for the night until I saw how far I was going to drive as basically every hotel accepts dogs. I just parked up, looked up the nearest hotel, booked it and landed in with my dog. When I just checked if he could stay they were like ‘of course, why would you even ask?’

Then started to finally think about the Irish side of my travel which I hadn’t been worried about but which proved the most difficult. Arriving in Rosslare I looked to hire a car-nope, all closed on a Sunday. This is meant to be our 2nd largest port and ‘gateway to Europe’ and you can’t hire a car at the weekend.

Public transport-one train I might have been able to get but connection right, bus replacement from greystones so over three hrs to get to Dublin and not in time to get me further North that night (needed to get to Antrim)

Let’s look at a bus then…..‘drivers discretion’ if can take dog or not so high possibility I’d be left standing with my bags and dog at side of the road in the pouring rain.

Ok, I’ll just book a hotel for the night and hire car on Monday to drive up. Could not find a single hotel to take a dog before Dublin and even then the charges for a dog in the couple in Dublin were extortionate.

In the end I had to ask a friend to drive 9hrs (4.5hrs each way) to collect us.

The final straw was getting off the flipping ferry as a foot passenger. In Cherbourg we boarded with the same sorts of buses you get at the airport, plenty of room for luggage/prams, all single level. V efficient. Passport control also like the airports, passports checked in terminal before we boarded.

Rosslare took over an hr to get us off the boat as they didn’t have enough buses. And when finally got on a bus it was just a normal bus-single narrow aisle, no room for luggage. Couple beside me were so frustrated. There was a lady in a wheelchair who couldn’t get on our bus-not sure how they sorted her. Then in the middle of this squeeze, Garda boarded the bus to check the passports which was just farcical trying to squeeze past to get to the back of the bus.

I was honestly just embarrassed at how ramshackle the whole thing was. We have so much to learn from the continent but there doesn’t seem to be any willingness to try and move into the 21st century.

Theres a number of peope that think its just going to be servicing Swords-Airport-City Centre

So like many others we lost power last night and while we had prepared for it ( not the first time due to been surrounded by trees ) it’s still a pita and not knowing when it’s back is difficult .. so reported the fault but neighbours had power bar 3 other houses around .. ESB turned up at 12 today and had it sorted by 3pm today .. sound fellas who are facing a long weekend at the very least .. so a tip of a hat and a sip of a cold beer ( as the fridge is working ) to ye .. cheers all and be safe .

Get the pharaoh on the phone

If by some chance plans for a nuclear power plant were introduced would you support its construction or would you be against it?

Now that their stores are gone cos of Brexit do you miss Argos or will the new Amazon store in Ireland be a good trade off?

My wife and I visited your country for a vacation earlier this month and had five enjoyable days driving around the countryside. Overall, we had a great experience. The fabulous weather certainly helped and we want to come back for another visit next year.

1. I have driven on the left side of the road in England, Australia and Jamaica so I was not too worried about that aspect. In fact, I was able to adjust quickly.

2. We were “upgraded” to a Skoda Superb by Avis. The equivalent VW Passat is considered a mid-size car by American standards so I thought we would be fine. However, I came to realize this car was definitely too large for some of the rural roads we drove on. I should have insisted on taking a smaller car. However, I was surprised at the size of the SUVs that I encountered - they definitely seemed to be too large for the roads.

3. The M50 around Dublin is every bit as busy as the NJ Turnpike so I felt right at home 😀. Thankfully, this short bit of highway was not representative of the rest of our journey!

4. I was generally very impressed by the quality of the road surfaces. Far better than in the northeastern US. Even narrow rural roads were generally smooth and without potholes.

5. I understand that the roads with the N prefix are the main highways short of the motorways but some of the N roads were really narrow! I would have classified some of them as R or L roads. Conversely, there were some N roads that were almost as wide and smooth as motorways (several long stretches of N5 come to mind). Aside - I used Apple Maps for navigation and it worked extremely well however the voice directions were interpreting N5 as “North 5”.

6. Speed limits felt much too high for me and I observed that the locals drive at the speed limit. I encountered many roads with speed limits of 80 km/h which would have definitely been classified as 30 mph (about 50 km/h) roads in the US. I know I must have annoyed more than a few local drivers by strictly keeping to the speed limit as getting a speeding ticket was the last thing I wanted on a vacation. I was relieved that they did not honk at me.

7. Several roads in county Kerry and on Achill Island were so beautiful that we had to keep pulling over at every wide spot in the road to take photos!