99 thoughts on “Saturday’s Papers

  1. Charger Salmons

    Six weeks ago Aer Lingus cancelled €1500 worth of flights to Washington and despite their legal obligation of a full refund they offered me a voucher instead.
    After sending a number of emails I’ve heard nothing since.
    If they went down in flames and every last one of their employees crawled from the blazing wreckage begging for help I wouldn’t waste my piss on them.
    They were a dreadful airline before the pandemic and they deserve everything that’s coming to them.

    1. Daisy Chainsaw

      The problem is that an Irish company was bought by a foreign entity. Aer Lingus had class and a great reputation until they sold out to IAG.

        1. Rosette of Sirius

          I’ve been an And Lingus customer for years and I find their service overall to be good to very good. Aircraft are generally clean and staff friendly and approachable. You’d thing that this basic service is common practice but let me tell you it’s far from it on many airlines. Broadly all the American international airlines, BA and plenty others. Their business class service is superior to BAs in every way and their implementation of tech on ground and in air has dramatically improved – in line with the rest of IAG airlines in fairness.

          Where they let themselves down are their lounges especially Dublin.

          They’re in a fight for survival. We live on an island. Wish for their demise at our peril. If they fail, it’s Ryanair or the boat.

          1. Charger Salmons

            Yeah you’re right.
            BA,AA,Delta,Emirates,Qatar,KLM,Etihad,Catahy Pacific,Air France,Air Canada and others.
            None of them fly from Ireland…
            Aer Lingus’ problem is it offers low-cost carrier service at premium prices.I haven’t used them to get to the UK in years.

          2. Rosette of Sirius

            You’re missing the point. They don’t have to fly to or from Ireland should they chose note to. Your could argue that even Ryanair could survive without Irish traffic they’ve expanded so broadly.

            Aer Lingus does. They have to. They are the only airline that is anchored here. Their potential failure harms our national interest.

          3. Charlie

            I can’t be bothered checking the others but both Etihad and Emirates fly out of Dublin. Fantastic first class lounges too. Just saying.

          4. Rosette of Sirius

            I’ve never flown Etihad but I’m very fond of Emirates when I fly east and south. Their own lounges are a sight to behold. Perhaps only bested by the Swissair first lounge in Zurich. BA have fallen so far being their other full service competitors it’s shocking.

    2. Formerly known as @ireland.com

      Why not the queen’s pounds and why not the queen’s BA? Traitor.

    3. Brother Barnabas

      you wont get anywhere with emails – being ignored in my experience

      but within couple of days of contacting via twitter, I got the refund

  2. Mé Féin

    Racing Post
    Morning Star
    I
    What are these things? I have never seen them on a newstand in Ireland. Is this a British thing with the front pages?

    1. bisted

      …I suppose there’s little point in asking you if you think a high draw might be favoured in the Stewards Cup today after Bataash broke the course record on fast ground yesterday…or where the pro-Palestine supporters are holding their BDS protest today…

  3. Formerly known as @ireland.com

    A quarter of positive cases who were told to self isolate in Melbourne, were not home when the police went to check them. That is how your second wave happens.

    1. Sirtuffyknight

      This is just a continuation of the first wave, only 103 deaths up to the end of May. You can’t prevent the inevitable in a globalised world, just hope they have appropriate measures in place/treatments available to protect their most vulnerable.

    2. bisted

      …somebody in Melbourne was telling me the latest outbreak was due to hotels that were requisitioned for quarantine being staffed by people on the minimum wage with no PPE or experience rather than health professionals…

  4. Charger Salmons

    It only needs dav to comment now and the Broadsheet Losers Club will have a quorum.

      1. Mary (Never) Wong

        Oddly Paddy O’Toole isn’t talking too much about the cricket today. Ireland 212-9

          1. Mary (Never) Wong

            what part of hosts stumble to victory had you trouble with James?
            England v Ireland: Hosts stumble to victory in second ODI to seal series win

          2. Charger Salmons

            What part of winning a 50-over match with 18 overs to spare does your pistachio-sized brain not understand ?
            It’s like the final whistle in a game of camogie being blown just after half-time.
            Seriously,you’re becoming an embarrassment to yourself.
            You make even dav look like an intellectual.

  5. Charger Salmons

    At this stage now the government and medical “experts” are simply being totally dishonest with the Irish public.
    Nowhere in any of today’s coverage of the ‘ worrying upsurge in Covid-19 causing a possible re-think about re-opening of pubs ‘ are there any facts about the number of hospital admissions.
    Look through all the papers and tell me if you find a figure.
    You won’t but it’s kind of important don’t you think ?
    Hospital admissions and deaths are what define the seriousness of a pandemic not the rate of infection.
    The last published data we had last week was that the number of people in ICU with C-19 was in single figures – why no update ?
    Likewise, tucked away in the Irish Times coverage of the 85 case ” spike ” was the startling fact that only two of the new infections were as the direct result of international travel.
    Yet the country’s airline and tourist industries are being totally decimated.
    For what reason ? A C-19 outbreak among a bunch of migrants living in a direct provision centre and working for minimum pay in a meat processing plant so Ireland could have cheap burgers.
    And actually the spike has now fallen away to only 38 and they won’t tell us how many of them are non-serious.
    Mask wearing ? A total con.You could fit hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 viruses into the full stop at the end of this sentence yet a home-made mask is meant to prevent their spread – give me a break.
    Flu deaths ? The influenza season is over now but no record of the number of fatalities has been released.Perhaps there weren’t any.For the first year ever.
    You’re being treated like total and utter saps while the people running this crapshoot head off for a six week break.
    And all the while hundreds of thousands of people sit at home on €350 a week because the government won’t tell them they don’t have any jobs to go back to and anyway the word PUP sounds way nicer than the dole.

      1. Charger Salmons

        Kevin Myers ? I’ll take that as a compliment.
        A fine wordsmith.
        Have you finally decided who you are ?

        1. Joe F

          I don’t hear you on so much the last few days about your good pal Bozo old boy. Funny that, no mention from you about situation from (where you claim to come from) North of England. Or the shambles of way of reporting, or the report that England had highest rate in Europe. Anyway, you can ignore all that old boy and post about SIR Ian Botham. Funny that also, how you don’t use SIR Keir Starmer, purely because he’s Labour. I’m so sorry we don’t have a class system in Ireland, damn it anyway.

      2. Charlie

        It’s not Kevin Myers. Myers spends far less time writing on the internet and gets out of the house occasionally.

    1. f_lawless

      With deaths, hospitalisations and ICU admissions continuing in rapid decline, what’s happening now in Europe no longer fits the definition of “epidemic”. Maybe you could call it a “casedemic”?

      Live stream of a protest underway on the streets of Berlin. They’re marching under the banner “End to the Pandemic”.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B7MoFME5zc&app=desktop

        1. Charger Salmons

          If they’re issued weekly why did they stop in April ?
          Precisely the point I was trying to make.
          There’s huge dishonety around the figures being bandied about by health officials who even now refuse to be questioned properly by the media.

      1. Charger Salmons

        Well spotted.
        And that was from two days ago.
        Today’s figure could be even less.
        The true price this country is paying for these miniscule admission figures will not be known until the recession kicks in but it will be very,very bloody.

          1. Nigel

            Not having economies capable of dealing with this kind of disruption is a bad thing. Getting economies back to ‘normal’ in a time of predicted increasing disruption is going to keep giving us cyclically wrecked and recovering economies vulnerable to the next looming disruption. If you’re complaining about the current situation, that’s what you need to be looking at. This was obvious and predictable long before 2007, but if we didn’t learn it in 2007, well, maybe we will at the next crash, pandemic, disaster, or whatever.

          2. sidhe

            is economic success that much more important than the health of society? do we want to take that risk?

          3. Nigel

            I think it would be a good idea to begin approaching the problem as if it weren’t a question of either/or, because this is just gong to keep happening.

          4. sidhe

            that’s a good point

            it shouldn’t be a case of either/or, but for some reason it does seem to be posed as that

            an all-encompassing lockdown like we had before is obviously bad for the economy as a whole, but clearly we need to learn to manage the virus, in that a balance between public health and economic health can be met as a long term solution

            I’m not an economist or a doctor so I have no idea how that can be met, to be perfectly honest

          5. Nigel

            I propose that if there aren’t economists/doctors/environmentalists/climatologists/disasterologists and assorted other relevant experts that haven’t already begun thinking about this – and there are and they have – then we set them to it – set them the challenge of coming up with viable alternatives to our current models that are fair, sustainable and resilient.

          1. Nigel

            Whether the Salmon is or isn’t a fantasist is beside the point – people do clean up in economic disasters that devastate the majority of the population. That’s why we’re not allowed to change to more sustainable and resilient economic models.

  6. Fred Foster

    I.A.G. gave a commitment to the Irish government in 2015 to operate Irish routes on the airline’s Heathrow slots for a period of five years. Paschal O’Donoghue was Finance Minister at the time of the sell off. He is Finance Minister now, in what looks like the final sell out.
    Those Heathrow slots are worth millions. Closing Shannon and Cork Aer Lingus operations means that some of those slots can now be made available to other I.A.G companies.

    1. Mary (Never) Wong

      they are worth millions yes but are not a transferable asset
      This was the aim all along

    2. GiggidyGoo

      SAS sold a winter slot pair for €22m in 2015 to Turkish Airlines. They sold a summer slot to what’s believed to be an american airline for €60m. The values of the Aer Lingus slots could be in excess of €1bn in normal times.
      Thanks blueshirts

  7. GiggidyGoo

    I knew it, you knew it, and Paschalscallywag Donohue knew it at the time how this was eventually going to pan out. The sell off of the country’s assets (the rights to the Lottery by Howlin as well, not to mention the gifting to Dinny) had sfa to do with us paying back any notional debts to the bondholders.

    1. Lucy McGee

      I like your use of the word or term ‘notional’ vs calling it ‘national’.
      Nice and subtle, but also true.

      You can be in my gang.

      1. Mary (Never) Wong

        Hey there lucy
        He’s already in mine
        Isn’t he so peachy?
        He’d really like if it you call him “Sir”

      2. GiggidyGoo

        The EU buckos make sure to get their pound of flesh. No sooner that the Apple Tax was knocked on the head, Michilín gave up an equivalent amount in ‘support’ of the Covid fund. One way or another, the FFGG’rs wil turn on the Irish money tap to Germany

      1. SOQ

        That’s what I call national security- no word on Grindr mind.

        Last time I checked there were security concerns about it too.

        1. Nigel

          No actual security measures? One less competitior for Zuckerburg? He banned an app that annoyed him. He canceled it. Weird how it doesn’t count when actual authoritarian power is exercised.

          1. SOQ

            I am sure you’ll love China Nigel- we will all chip in for the flight- you’ll be funding the return by yourself- obviously.

          2. Nigel

            You think Trump’s going to protect you from the big bad China? About as effectively as he’s stood up for the Uighur Muslims?

          3. SOQ

            Thank you for your commentary Titania.

            You are like the Hermann Kelly of the right- definitely the same IQ range.

  8. Lilly

    More noncommittal waffle from Hugh Linehan writing in The Irish Times on the Shelbourne statues. I’d like to know what has happened to the Louis Le Brocquy tapestry that used to hang over the fireplace in the lobby.

  9. Johnny Green

    …the once most dangerous woman in the world,one the most famous union organizer in US,was baptized on this day in Cork,(her b’day unkown).
    “….As the new 20th century approached, Mary Jones was an aging, poor, widowed Irish immigrant, nearly as dispossessed as an American could be. She had survived plague, famine, and fire, only to confront a lonely old age….”
    https://www.motherjones.com/about/history/

  10. Charger Salmons

    It’s a little known fact that the new head of MI6 had a grandfather who was in the IRA.
    We live in strange times.

  11. f_lawless

    RTE is gaslighting the Irish public. These are their opening lines to an article on the massive protest earlier today in Berlin against the German government’s continued lockdown measures.

    https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0801/1156885-berlin-covid-19-protest/

    “A Berlin protest against coronavirus restrictions drew thousands, from the hard left and right to conspiracy theorists.

    Police put turnout at 15,000, well below the 500,000 organisers had announced”

    Contrast that with some actual photos of the event to get a sense of the scale of it.

    https://news.yahoo.com/thousands-protest-berlin-against-coronavirus-115205349.html

    Dubbing the ordinary people (that can be seen in the close-up photos) as ” hard left and right to conspiracy theorists” is disgraceful journalism and so transparent in its real intent – ie. to dissuade the Irish public from organising in large numbers in protest of the Irish government’s disastrous, ill-conceived policy measures.

      1. f_lawless

        The key issue of course is that RTE is Ireland’s national broadcaster.

        The BBC are a bit more subtle with their propaganda:

        “The BBC’s Damien McGuinness said some participants were from the far right and some were conspiracy theorists who do not believe Covid-19 exists, but others were ordinary people who simply object to the government’s approach to the pandemic.”

        Smear by association. By giving mention to fringe extremists (there’ll always be at least a few in every large political gathering) and by mentioning them first in the sentence, the underlying intention is ultimately the same: to skew the reader’s impression of the crowd’s make-up and thereby dissuade the reader from considering similar actions in the UK as reasonable.

          1. SOQ

            Comments replied to cannot be deleted is it?

            Your username has changed on the Berlin link darling.

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