I know, the bridge/tunnel was crazy. Northern Ireland uses a different rail gauge to the rest of the UK; the tunnel would need to be electrified - but the railways on either side are not electrified; and the line linking the SW of Scotland to the main arterial routes is little more than a branch line. God only knows what the total cost of this boondoggle would have been.
And all the time, the Republic is building new infrastructure to link its ports directly to the EU without having to transit through the UK. And good luck to them.
Frost’s speech will have done wonders for the case of uniting Ireland. I just hope that the dinosaur-denying nutters in the DUP will haemorrhage support for their denial of reality - and that the majority of that support moves towards the centre rather than to even more extreme ‘unionist’ parties who are still umbilically-linked to terrorism.
Thing is the Ryanair model is the Southwestern business model (in terms of the aircraft and supply and all that) they just added a wrinkle of extra anti union and the personality of the CEO as a cult. He’s aggressively, deliberately, actually, an arsehole. That’s his thing and it propagates rhrough the company. Is it a performance? It’s a performance like gender in that his horrifically sexist remarks that he makes in public are in keeping with what everybody I know who has met him one on one says he says. Like that’s him. Being total fucking arseholes is both the corporate stance, and the genuine expression of their culture and personality.
He and they are like Aussies. They are like Aussie mine owners with their contempt and greed and disregard for the environment and the world and their hatred and contempt for their workers only Ryanair also apply that to their customers. Why would we look for customer service models from sweatshop bosses?
It’s probably in part a function of where I have lived, but I have found that while Ryanair often offers the cheapest plane tickets, they rarely lead to any significant savings in total trip costs. The first time I discovered this, I paid so much to park at the Charleroi airport that I would have been better off taking public transit to the Brussels airport and flying Air France. And that’s not even factoring in the cost of transportation into my destination city from whatever remote airport they fly into, the unpleasant airport experience, the aggressively loud in-air advertising, and the significant risk of being charged a ridiculous fee because a carry-on that it suitable for every other airline on the planet is half a centimeter too large to smash into their testing frame. In my experience, they are a thoroughly unpleasant airline. The only reason I would ever choose Ryanair again is if they had the only non-stop from where I am to my destination (and even then, I’d seriously consider choosing a connection).
I was more worried that saying that “They’re like Aussies”, when you mean “They’re like Gina Reinhart” is like saying “They’re like Americans” when you mean “They’re like Jeff Bezos”.
