This is a Q&A which I wrote for Wednesday’s Irish Times on the M50 toll plaza changes which come into affect today.

And this is an article which appeared in the Evening Herald 24 hours later.

While it is not uncommon for some papers to borrow extensively from others - and it’s not really the end of the world when it happens - I think whoever is responsible for stealing this particular article and using it to fill a page of the Herald should at least have had the decency to change it round a little, maybe switch the order of the questions, swap a coma for dash, anything at all really, to show they had put just the tiniest bit of effort or thought into the theft.

While I am not adverse to the odd marmite sandwich, I was pretty horrified to read – in The Sun, admittedly – today of the East London builder who has been living on little else for the last quarter of a century. George Lambert (35) from Hackney apparently eats the savoury spread at every meal and each month he makes his way through a stack of sandwiches seven feet high. He’s not entirely adverse to variety in his diet, however, and occasionally adds beetroot, bananas, celery and sardines to his marmite treats.

Incidentally, wordpress has just told me that this is my 400th post (I am glad it’s about such a worthy topic!) I might go make myself a marmite, beetroot, bannana and sardine sandwich to mark the occasion.

It has been a long time coming, but the day motorists, who have spent hours on the M50, parked and fuming, have dreamed of is nearly upon us. From next Saturday, we are promised that the tool-booth bottlenecks that have played a starring role for years in Ireland’s motorway black comedy will finally disappear. Or at least start to.

The National Roads Authority (NRA) took control of the West-Link toll plaza at the beginning of this month after buying out the National Toll Roads contract for €488 million. On Friday night, the barriers will rise for the very last time after which they will be replaced by electronic tags and number plate recognition technology which will levy the tolls.

The hated plaza won’t disappear until October at the very earliest, however, and the dismantling process means congestion is likely to get a lot worse before it gets any better. Diversions through the plaza will be put in place and speed will be restricted during the autumn demolition works.

Worryingly, the NRA has admitted it expects motorists to face “teething problems” with the new system and has said that it will take two years before the full benefits of the scheme are realised, news which is sure to depress the 100,000 motorists who use the M50 daily.
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AER LINGUS has increased the handling charges for people booking return fares through its website by over 60 per cent, or €4, since the start of the summer.

At the beginning of July, tickets booked on the airline’s website incurred a handling fee of €6 per ticket, irrespective of whether the ticket was one-way or return. On July 8th, the company scrapped this flat fee system in favour of a per-journey charge of €4.

While the change meant that the small number of people booking one-way trips saved €2 on each journey, people who booked return trips were hit with an increase of the same amount.

The latest price hike, introduced with little or no publicity on August 12th, has seen the airline’s handling fee for a return journey booked using a credit card go from €8 to €10. This means a family of four booking a return journey with the airline would now have to pay €40 in handling fees - compared to €24 six weeks ago.
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This delightful little sign was spotted and snapped by an eagle-eyed user of the magicmum.com website this week. And to think most other supermarkets go out of their way to hide price increases from shoppers!

More problems with Dell, this time from a listener to the Ray Darcy show. She bought a Dell laptop in February but about six weeks ago it started acting up. She had a next-business-day warranty which meant – or was supposed to mean – that a technician would be on site within 24 hours to fix it. She phoned Dell but an agent told her there was nothing he could do for her. She rang again to be told fixing the laptop would cost €400. She rang a third time and got through to someone who seemed helpful. He asked to take control of her laptop remotely to determine the problem. He then spent about 2 hours ‘fixing’ it and started looking through her personal photos and files. Two days later the lap top broke again and wouldn’t turn on. She rang the support line again and eventually Dell accepted she needed a technician.
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I’ve just heard what might the most pointless ad ever broadcast on Irish radio. It was from the water conservation people and urged listeners not to use hoses to water their grass. Sorry, what? Did someone really think it was absolutely necessary to spend money - our money - on cautioning people against watering their grass with a hose? Just when are we supposd to be out watering the grass? In between sandbagging our houses keep the torrential rains out? Pity they haven’t heard of money conservation.

A sad day. . .

THE RIP-OFF CULTURE that exists in Galway during the races can only be described as “utterly disgusting and opportunistic and extremely short-sighted in these toughening times”, writes Joe McElwee, a businessman from the city. In the middle of race week, McElwee rang a hotel in the city which he uses frequently for business purposes. The corporate rate is approximately €68 per night, he says, but the price he was quoted for a single room on the night in question was €299. He gave his name and the name of his company and pointed out that he had at least 15 of his clients stay in the hotel over the past year alone and asked if he could get a better rate, “but the answer was an emphatic no”.
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The recent spat between two of the country’s biggest supermarkets has been very public, very bad-tempered and very expensive. Over the past fortnight Tesco and Lidl have been paying big money to tear strips off each other in newspaper ads and on billboards, with claims and counter claims going back and forth about the quality and value of the products they’re offering.

Last month, Tesco, perhaps unwittingly, started the mud-slinging by launching what it described as a €100 million price-cutting campaign aimed at stopping its customers switching to the discount retailers Aldi and Lidl. The campaign saw 1,000 products bundled together under a “Cash Saver” range and the retail giant making a promise that its prices wouldn’t “be beaten by anyone”. It also warned its rivals that it would do whatever it felt was needed to keep its word.

The move was prompted, in part at least, by repeated National Consumer Agency (NCA) surveys which showed that the discounters were between 20 per cent and 50 per cent cheaper than the more established retailers. Separate studies from the NCA showed that, because of the increasingly wide price gaps, consumers had started modifying their shopping habits in search of better value.
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IT WOULDN’T BE summer without the tourist industry chiefs complaining about the fall-off in visitor numbers. And while in the past few years there has been a distinct whiff of the boy who cried wolf about many of the moans, this year the hoteliers and restaurant owners might be right on the money.

As the euro remains stubbornly strong and the economic downturn really takes hold, all over the world - or at least those parts of the world that can afford to come to Ireland on their holidays - times are undoubtedly getting tougher. Not only can fewer overseas visitors afford to come here, fewer Irish people are willing to spend their money blindly in expensive cafes, pubs and restaurants.
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A listener to the Ray Darcy show, where I do a turn every Monday as a consumer agony uncle got in touch in connection with Paypal. This listener sold her laptop in March to a chap in Kenya for £500 sterling. The money was paid into her paypal account. She contacted the buyer to arrange shipping and was asked if she could send it via courier to insure it arrived safely which she did at a cost of €90.

She had a tracking number for the package which she followed all the way to Kenya. Then she got positive feedback from the seller both by email and through eBay.

Two months later and she’s looking at her paypal account when she notices that there is a credit card chargeback being made against it for €90. The amount the buyer in Kenya had paid for the delivery. Paypal contacted her asking for details and froze the money. They then told her the case was closed and the money was taken out of her account. Then a month later she noticed that there was a chargeback being made for the full £500 which she had sold the laptop for.
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A motorist from the Middle East, who obviously has a whole lot more money than sense, has reportedly spent the guts of €30,000 shipping his ‘Batman’ Lamborghini (it’s what the caped one drives in the latest film) over 3000 miles by plane from Qatar to London for an oil change. The €250,000 car was transported on a scheduled flight and then flown back to the Middle East. The service at an approved dealer (the least you’d expect after going to such trouble) cost €5000 while another 25 grand was spent on shipping. The owner, who remains a mystery - although I’d say he (and I’d stake your life on him being a he) is a bit of a gobshite - might has well have travelled to the Artic and strangled a few polar bears in person.

So I was watching TV a few minutes ago, again almost flat on my back (it’s a theme of the day), when I saw this ad for Just For Men. It is, I’m guessing, trying to be cute but comes out creepy. It also made me ask way too many questions. Where’s the children’s mother? Dead, I’m thinking, but you can never be sure - maybe she ran off with a carnie. How long has she been gone? A month? A year? When is it time, exactly? What made the kids think their dad needed to dye his hair before he’d be attractive to other women? And, really, what kind of lessons is he teaching them by so readily agreeing to cosmetically alter (I was going to say enhance, but who can say?) his appearance in order to find them a replacement mother? There are so many, many things wrong with this ad that I wish I had grey hair so I could refuse to buy it.

I’ve just been listening to the Ray Darcy show - flat on my back, incidentally for reasons best known to myself - and they’re running an item on a pub call Matt the Thrasher in Birdhill, Co Tipperary. Apparently it is quite a well known pub, but I have to confess to never having heard of it before this morning. A listener contacted the show to complain that the menu contained a warning that crying babies would not be tolerated in the pub/restaurant and their parents would be asked to remove them from the premises until they were settled. The owner, Ted Moynihan, came on air to defend the policy. He also defended (or at least tried to) past decisions to refuse mourners in a funeral cortege access to the toilets in the pub, while the hearse waited outside and a number of other, shall we say, strict interpretations of the door policy.

Sounds like a delightful place.

The show had a quick poll to see if readers agreed with the policy and nearly three thousand people voted in the space of no more than 10 minutes. Amazingly, 57 per cent agreed with the pub’s policy.

Incidentally I’ve just had a quick look on Trip Advisor and the reviews of the pub are less than flattering to say the very the least.

There was a time when the only the makers of certain shampoos and moisturisers could get away making absolutely ridiculous claims about their products. In recent years, however, more and more manufacturers have climbed on board the crazy train and now if you take a walk through your local supermarket, you will quickly lose count of the number of foods that promise to keep you alive and gorgeous looking for longer.

There are sugary cereal bars which use extra nutrients and calcium to distract from their calorific content, vegetable spreads that promise to lower your cholesterol in a heart beat and yoghurt drinks with unpronounceable additives which, the ads say, will improve you digestion and immunity. And because these products are even better than real food — as the manufacturers will have you believe — they can justify charging a premium for them. It’s a win win situation, for them at any rate.
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I was at a wedding in Sligo over the last few days so completely missed the sale of century in Dublin. During the long and miserable recession of the 1980s we queued outside the US embassy and inside dole offices, but in this 21st century version we’re to be found forming an orderly line outside Habitat in search of bargains. The ultimate closing down sale apparently continues tomorrow (Monday) as long as there is stock left to sell, although the chances of anything of any use at all being left now is pretty slim.

The practice certain airlines have of charging people hefty credit card fees comes under the Sunday Times microscope today. As has been mentioned on this blog many times, Ryanair is one such airline. It charges a €5 per flight handling fee when credit cards are used to make bookings. That means someone paying for return flights for themselves and nine of their pals is hit with €100 in handling fees for one single transaction. Ryanair says it is charged a handling fee by banks for every passenger included in a single credit card transaction but, according to Jan Battles, the banks say this is ain’t so. Typically credit card companies charge around 2 per cent of the total cost of a transaction to handle the credit card. So let’s say the you book ten return tickets to London at a cost of €50 a pop. Ryanair will charge you €100 in credit card handling fees - that’s 20 per cent of the total cost of the flights and around ten times what the credit card company will actually charge them.

Forget all the random street violence and stabbings in the UK, an English city council has got the real problem in its sights. Worcester City Council has introduced a strict code of conduct on ice cream men. Ice cream men of all people! New rules mean they can’t sound their chimes for longer than four seconds at a time or more than once every three minutes. Nor will they be able to sound their cheery tinkle within 50 metres of a place of worship or outside schools during school hours, And no music at all will be allowed before 12pm and after 7pm. Jonathan Richman would be turning in his grave, if he were dead, which, thankfully he isn’t

‘Knickers renewed - one good pair from two old pairs; here’s how to manage it,” begins one snappy article from a collection of pamphlets originally published by the British government during the second World War and which have recently appeared in book form.

The trick, apparently, is to cut a new gusset from the back of one pair and neatly sew it into place on the other pair and off you go, good as new.

Make Do and Mend contains dozens of original facsimile leaflets offering hundreds of tips on how to make everything from carpets and gloves to saucepans and blinds last a whole lot longer. There are details on how to darn deftly and instructions on how best to convert a tired pair of men’s pyjamas into a reinvigorated summer frock for your daughter (although there are no instructions on how to make said daughter like or wear said frock).
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