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There’s a fascinating site online that I kind of tripped and fell into without meaning to. I’m glad I did though because they have some fantastic European map comparisons on display and like it or not, I’m going to share with you some of the more surprising facts I found there. Of course, with this writer being at home in Ireland, these observations are from the perspective of this wet and windy outpost.

So to kick off then, there are the highest temperatures ever recorded by country. Well, in Ireland, the highest temperature ever recorded was 33.3℃ whereas the UK record is 38.5℃. The Scandinavians are even hotter than us Irish with Norway, (35.6℃), Sweden, (38℃), Finland, (37.2℃) and little Denmark, (36.4℃). In fact, aside from Iceland, (30.5℃), we Irish have the lowest highest recorded temperature in all of Europe. Best at something at last!

As my medium of communication is the internet, I wondered how we Paddies did in the connection-speeds stakes. Measured in average speed of internet connection, (megabits per second), the UK is pretty high at 11.6. The Scandies of course roar along at 14.1 (Norway), 15.8 (Sweden) and 13.7 (Finland). Germany is 10.2, France 7.5, Spain 8.9, Italy 6.1 and wealthy Switzerland 14.9. But it’s the ‘Thick Micks’ who again come out best with 17.4 megabits per second. Who’d have thought we, of all people, would have the fastest connection to the net in the whole of Europe, maybe even the World?

Feeling on a bit of a role, I turned next to the booze naturally. I reckoned in terms of beer consumption in litres per year per capita we had a certain gold medal in the bag. I reckoned without the Austrians at 108, the Germans at 106, the Estonians at 102 and the Poles at 99, the pissheads! But we did come in a credible fifth though at 98 litres per year per capita. Mind you, the Brits were a miserable 69 and I’m not referring to anything of a sexual nature here. Of course, the French can’t hold their beer, we all know that. Only 30 litres per year per capita in Froggie-land but there’s a good reason for that in their case.

That reason is of course, the ‘vino-collapso’. The sexy French like their little tipple of wine, 53 litres of it per capita per year to be precise. Only the Portuguese pop the cork more often at 55 litres. Paddy likes a respectable 24 litres of it but the superior sophistication of the Brits means an even more soused 30 litres across the pond. Strangely, the Spanish are at a quite abstemious 17 litres, the Italians a mere 34 litres and the Germans even less than the British at 25 litres and they all produce the stuff. Incidentally, the average wine bottle holds 750ml so our Irish 24 litres per year per capita translates into 32 bottles per person per annum. Let’s see now, there’s four of us at home and I’m the only one who likes wine. So if I have mine and theirs, that’s 128 bottles a year for me, or a bottle every two or three days. Yup! That’s about right then!

There’s hardly a week goes by right now that we don’t hear of the immigrant problem in Europe. Sweden is certainly having that problem with 16.9% of the population there currently having been born elsewhere. Oddly enough, the Med countries of Spain, (12.4%), Italy (9.5%), and Greece, (11.2%) are quite low given, we are told, they are where the recent immigrant population is landing first. It’s clear the Poles want nothing to do with immigrants regardless of where they come from because their influx stands at a mere 1.6%. Even Russia is higher at 8.2%. The UK has traditionally been in the crosshairs of Johnny-foreigner looking for a place to hang his hat so they have a foreigner percentage of 13.4%, higher than France at 12%. But I was stunned to see little Ireland with the immigrant proportion of our population standing at 15.8%. Where are they all and what possessed them to come here FFS? Odd to report as well that we don’t seem to have any problems with the immigrants who do come here. Maybe they’re just enjoying the craic?

But maybe it is something more sinister than that. Ireland has long been plagued by emigration so when you look at the map of the number of people born in a given country but currently living abroad, measured as a percentage of the overall population, we Irish are the third highest at 18.8% in Europe, (behind Portugal at 22.3% & Lithuania at 18.9%). To put our 18.8% in perspective, our closest neighbour and friend, the UK, stands at 7.6%. Remember the PIGS countries from not too long ago? We were broke and the EU was thinking of introducing a lesser euro currency for us. Those countries in terms of emigration as a result were Portugal (22.3%) Ireland as mentioned (18.8%) Greece (8%) and Spain (2.7%). Must be things weren’t so bad in some non-Irish PIGS countries because they don’t seem to have been forced to seek work elsewhere. Incidentally, the French are the most reluctant to emigrate, at 3.3%.

Speaking of work, I was interested to see the average hours worked per worker including part-time workers. It seems the Greeks work the longest at 49 hours a week, (on average) followed by the Poles and Latvians at 37 hours. Again Paddy was up there with the Estonians and Lithuanians at 36 hours a week. The lazy Frogs can only manage a 28-hour week while the industrious Krauts are only industrious for 26 hours a week. Even the Italians and Spanish are at work for 33 hours in a given week. The Brits kick in at an acceptable 32 hour-week, the same as the Finns and Slovenians actually.

I have noted in these pages in the past that Ireland has become obsessively Dublin-centric. As if to dismiss this observation of mine, a friend from Dublin told me it was the same with London and the UK, meaning I suppose that if it is good enough for the Brits then it’s good enough for us. But then I look at the map of the percentage of the total population, (by Country), living in the metropolitan area of its Capital and London has 21% while Dublin holds a staggering 40% of the Irish population. I’ll rattle off a few others too for comparison, Paris 19%, Madrid 14%, Berlin 5%, Rome 7%, Warsaw 8%, Brussels 19%, Amsterdam 14% Stockholm 16%, Copenhagen 36% and Athens 35%, to name but a few. It would seem that we Paddies have seriously fucked it up in the smooth population distribution stakes at home.

So what did we learn from our maps about Ireland comparatively speaking? Well, most of us live in Dublin, we work damned hard and when we can’t find work, we fuck off somewhere else to get it. While we’re away, foreign laddies take our place here and don’t stick out too much. We drink a shed-load of beer and plenty of wine with it, we’re flyers on the interweb and it never gets too hot here.

Sounds like us alright! But do have a sconce at the ‘Jacub Marian” site yourself, you’ll like it.

TAXI TOASTED

Let's Express Posted on by

Autism is a mental condition, present from early childhood, characterized by great difficulty in communicating and forming relationships with other people and in using language and abstract concepts, according to my dictionary. I don’t know a lot about it other than to say I’m grateful neither of my kids ever suffered from autism, and I have sympathy for parents affected by it.

Having said that, I do know a bit about driving taxis though because at one point, I drove taxis by night while paying my way through a course by day. Neither the car nor the plate were mine but that didn’t prevent my needing to return to base a few times to clean piss or vomit from the back seat. Mind you, the cheap rusting Toyotas we drove at the time had worse problems than that. But dealing with the public can be really trying at times.

Today the Indo reports that Bus Eireann has been ordered to pay €5,000 to an autistic teenager who was stopped from eating toast in his taxi to school, to which I can only ask, would you allow anyone eat toast in your bed? Apparently this teenager’s parents have a subsidized taxi pick this autistic lad up every morning, take him to a special school and then drop him home each afternoon. Here’s the thing though,the boy’s parents submitted that, owing to their son’s dietary requirements, he would have his breakfast of a slice of toast, a banana and fruit juice in the taxi en route to school. They maintained that any changes in the teen’s routine could cause difficulty and regression in his development.

Not unreasonably, it is Bus Eireann policy for pupils not to eat on school transport and there are health and safety issues with it too. So Mom & Pop maintain the lad has to have his toast and banana in the car while it is company policy not to permit it. The driver in question had just paid €60,000 for his new car and that’s Mercedes territory, isn’t it? If I had a new Merc and some little brat wanted to eat toast in it, I’d fuck him back where he came from, autism or no autism. But the Workplace Relations Commission found that the company had discriminated against the 16-year-old on the grounds of his disability. What a lot of bollox! The driver discriminated on the grounds of toast crumbs all over his tan leather seats.

But why can’t Mom & Dad feed this lad his breakfast in the family home before leaving for school, you know, in the traditional fashion? Don’t they want the crumbs on their kitchen floor? Are they afraid to slip on a discarded banana peel or perhaps they worry that the fruit juice could be sprayed all over the walls? And what is all this nonsense about it being distressing for the teenager if he can’t eat his breakfast in a brand new taxi? Most of all, why can’t one of them take their boy to school themselves? After all, that’s what the rest of us had to do.

But maybe for whatever reason, they can’t so the State subsidizes a taxi for them – shouldn’t they be grateful for that? Shouldn’t they be willing to compromise a little, move the boy’s breakfast time back a half hour? Instead they are five grand better off, (and the taxpayer will cover that in subsidies to Bus Eireann), and on top of that, they have got their way. Some poor taxi driver will now be forced to drive that this toast wielding autistic child so that his parents can get a break from him and perhaps have the time to blow the five grand.

Have we completely lost the run of ourselves?

HEADLINE NEWS – WE’RE RICH!

Let's Express Posted on by

According to Wikipedia, a United States Treasury security is an IOU from the US Government, (which you can buy). It is a government debt instrument issued by the United States Department of the Treasury to finance government spending as an alternative to taxation. Think of it as Uncle Sam borrowing a few bob from you, swearing that he’s good for it while also paying you the interest on it every couple of years until he decides to buy that IOU back from you for the cash you gave him. Now multiply that by trillions and you have treasury bonds.

Debt is a two-headed beast. If you are in debt, then that debt is a liability whereas if you are owed money, then the debt becomes an asset. So the sales of US bonds raise money for the US but they also become a debt the US owes. In 2017, the United States had a total public national debt of 20.25 trillion U.S. dollars. In 2016, the total interest expense on debt held by the public of the United States reached 273 billion U.S. dollars, Of the 20.25 trillion in US debt, foreign countries held a total of 6.29 trillion U.S. dollars in U.S. treasury securities as of March 2017.

All fine so far. But I ask you, in your opinion, which countries hold those bonds and who has the biggest share of them? It must surely be no surprise that the Chinese and the Japanese are the biggest holders of US debt, $1,187.7Bn and $1,043.5Bn respectively. Guess which country on Earth is the next largest holder of US debt? You are not going to believe this! The third biggest holder of US Treasury Bonds is non other than little Ireland!!!!!

How da fuck? ……………. What in Jaesus name? …………….. Nah, nah, nah, it can’t be! ………… Oh but it is. We Irish hold $317.9 billion dollars in US bonds or to put it another way, the USA owes Ireland $317.9 billion or about €280 billion. Now, to put that in perspective for you, Saudi Arabia holds £151.2, (versus Ireland $317.9 billion), Russia £96.1 (versus Ireland $317.9 billion), France $80.9 (versus Ireland $317.9 billion), Gemany $76.5 (versus Ireland $317.9 billion) and even the U.A.E. has less than us at $59.2, (versus Ireland $317.9 billion). I notice that Israel, that fanatical supporter of all things American, isn’t even on the list. But I must say, I’m staggered by this simple piece of statistical information. I mean, where the fuck did we get $317.9 billion from? We are the second most indebted Nation on Earth after Japan and just behind the Japs as well on this list. We apparently owe €200bn+ and we are paying huge interest annually on it. it’s why the health service is in meltdown and why we have a homeless crisis among other things. So why don’t we just cash in our chips with Uncle Sam, take the €280 billion owed to us and pay off the €200 billion we owe? We’d still have €80 or billion to play around with and absolutely no debt.

At this point, I must put on the record here that I am no financial whizz so in this instance I can only look at the stark statistics from “Statista” and speculate. But I know deep down that there is no way in hell that we, as a country, have that much money owing to us. So how come we are listed in third place? I can only guess that it must be big money skullduggery in high finance and in Ireland, that means the I.F.S.C. Dublin’s IFSC, which was set up by the Irish Government with EU approval in 1987, is globally recognised as a leading location for a range of internationally traded financial services, including banking, asset financing, fund management, corporate treasury management, investment management, custody and administration and specialised insurance operations.

More than 500 operations were approved to trade in under the IFSC programme. The centre is host to half of the world’s top 50 banks and to half of the top 20 insurance companies. Merrill Lynch, Sumitomo Bank, ABN Amro, Citibank, AIG, JP Morgan (Chase), Commerzbank,BNP Paribas and EMRO are just some of the big-name operations that have chosen to locate in the area. A sophisticated support network, including shared services centres, software development, and legal and accountancy companies, has also developed around the IFSC. So Yup! a veritable viper’s nest of big money skullduggery right on our shores. We are told that billions pass through this place everyday. Two years ago there was a piece in the paper with a photograph of a nondescript door. It was a one room office that allegedly traded several billion in financial instruments during the previous twelve months, even though that door never opened once.

If I am right, and I can only suspect that I am, then I have to confess to being quite relieved that we do not have $317.9 billion in US bonds. For one thing, those bonds are raised and sold by the US to fund the wars they are raging around the world. Secondly, the dollar is on very shaky ground right now. See here and here to learn more.

International experts have said that the only thing between the dollar collapsing and America going back to the stone age, is Saudi Arabia and their insistence on the petrodollar. So how stable the dollar is is also how stable you believe the sand Kings to be. At present, the Saudi’s are at war with the very small and very poor Yemen and are actively creating a situation of widespread famine in that country. If, as that article suggests, Saudi Arabia does collapse sooner rather than later, the overnight, the American dollar becomes worthless. It will be backed by nothing at all in a country that owes the world $20.25 trillion. In that scenario, our $317.9 billion in US bonds would go up in a puff of smoke …………. if we had them.

Of course, if the dollar goes, the Euro goes as well as does the £STG and the Japanese Yen. It would be a world in chaos so maybe, just maybe, the US is too big to fail, (where have I heard that expression before?).

IT’S ALL A BIT FLUID

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Our betters really are short-sighted. Not too long ago a decent performing family saloon in this country came with an annual road tax of over €1,000. The Revenue were taking in short of a billion snots a year on this racket. Then two things happened.

The climate change lot convinced the weak-minded in power that car tax should be charged on the basis of emissions and not engine size. The 2.5 liter flyer that I had was costing me over €900 a year at the time just to be street legal. But no sooner had I got rid of it for an old and underpowered 1.4liter car than the system changed to taxing emissions. The current model of the 2.5 liter flyer costs less to tax than my ancient small engined car.

The second thing that happened was the people standing up to the political bullies and forcing them to abandon double-taxation for water. This left the expensively created Irish Water with no income source so 100% of all of the car tax collected goes to Irish Water to keep the door open. Just as this was decided a trend to lower emission cars rose sharply and an idiot could have told our short-sighted betters that Revenue had to fall as a result.

We hear this morning that, “Department of Finance officials are warning the move to more efficient cars could ‘could severely challenge the revenue’ generated for the exchequer,” to which you can only add, “What the fuck did you think would happen?” So the, ‘ahem,’ brains in Leinster House are considering the idea that “Drivers could be taxed on distance travelled.”

There are pros and cons to this of course but the self same duplicitous politicians are stuck with financing Irish Water and a falling road tax amount has to be addressed lest the whole sorry spectacle collapses and political appointees at the top find themselves out of a job. The powers that be have obviously got the bean counters on the case and they must be pretty sure that taxing on distance travelled will put up most peoples car tax. It is the core dishonesty I can’t stand because in reality your car tax should be gauged on the amount of water you use in your home. They wouldn’t touch that one with a barge poll though.

When this mess gets ‘sort of sorted,’ the next message from Revenue is bound to be about the rapidly falling tax take from tobacco. God knows what the tobacco taxes fund because it is in excess of a billion a year and non-smokers are going to have to somehow pay to fill the growing gap. The anti-drinks outfit want to kill the tax take on booze, typically a handy little earner, so as the drinkers turn to, I don’t know, illicit drugs for their kicks and because there’s no tax on cocaine, the tee-totalers may be expected to make up the shortfall in drink taxes.

It’s all a bit fluid.