3. Dublin Airport. For the first time visitor to Ireland, your initial impression of the country starts with your airport experience. It is the same when you visit any country. Airports by their very nature are busy places and the test of an efficient and smoothly operating airport is the levels of stress that the traveler experiences getting in our out of the place.
Be prepared for a zoo at Dublin Airport! If you have never visited the country, and are thinking of doing so, look at alternative methods of entering the country. If you are on an Ireland vacation from America or Canada, fly to London and take a shuttle back to Cork, Shannon or Belfast in order to avoid a chaotic experience at Dublin. If that is not an option, get a ferry from the UK to Dublin Port. If that doesn’t work, then swim the Irish Sea!
Believe us here, any of the above means of avoiding Dublin, the Calcutta of the aviation world, will be more convenient than arriving or departing the place.
Dublin Airport is trying, unsuccessfully, to handle three times as many passengers as it is designed to take. Designed is, of course, is the wrong word. Nothing to do with Dublin Airport was ever designed, or planned, other than on the back of some wet toilet paper.
We could devote an entire book about the horrors of this kip. It reminds the uninitiated of what a refugee camp must be like. Thousands of people are scrambling through check-in, security, baggage handling etc. etc. There is always an air of disorganized panic in the place.
The arrivals and departure terminals are indistinguishable with frantic outgoing passengers meeting disoriented incoming passengers. The baggage handling carousels are disgorging the contents of two or three planes at once, leading to massive scrums as people fight to get their luggage. Inevitably, the lost luggage section is very busy area – staffed only by one disinterested girl who will threaten security on you if you raise your voice.
We could go on and on but why waste ink or paper. Those who read this and use Dublin Airport will understand. We are preaching to the converted.
For those of you who have never suffered, the advice is – do all you can to avoid it!
4. The prices in Ireland. Nothing can prepare the tourist on vacation in Ireland for the shock that will get when they see the prices of food and drink that, along with many other essential services for tourists, are higher than the famed Magilacuddy Reeks in Kerry.
Ireland is an expensive place to live as a resident, but it seems to us here that when people are on an Ireland vacation, there is an additional tier of profit added to the top line. This manifests itself by the greed of many in the industry who regard any tourist as ripe for easy pickings on the basis that they will never see them again.
It is not alone the small “Mom and Pop’ souvenir shops that are the guilty parties in this instance; the rip-off mentality starts at the top with our state-run companies who are the same organizations that loftily lecture us on giving value for money to the visitors to Ireland.
The DAA will fleece you for parking in any one the Irish airports it claims to run.
Dublin Bus and the Luis light-rail system will extract the maximum it can from your pocket. Unlike any major city in the world, Dublin has no integrated ticketing system where one can buy a ticket for a day or a week that will allow avail of all bus, rail and Luas for a set price. The same applies countrywide, where Bus Eireann and Irish Rail cannot have the presence of mind to get together and offer tourists- not to mention our own commuters- a universal ticket that would make travel in Ireland a little more bearable. Even when the unfortunate visitor eventually coughs up enough to take a train journey, the state of the trains in general is shocking. If you are lucky enough to get a meal on one of these ponderous contraptions, you will never, ever again condemn airline food. In fact, after your experience, airline meals will seem like those served in a Michelin – star restaurant!
If you wish to avoid the nightmare that is public transport in Ireland, you may consider hiring a car. Be prepared for a shock! Car hire rates in Ireland are among the highest in the world. Comparisons made by consumer organizations have found that in certain classes of vehicle, Ireland can be up to six – yes six! - times as expensive as our European neighbours. Excuses lamely produced by the perpetrators of this scam include the old chestnut that insurance and labour costs are higher in Ireland and, of course, they
have no option but to pass these charges onto their customers. Of course, they haven’t, in much the same way, as they have no option but to bank the excessive profits generated in Ireland on the back of this daylight robbery.
Once on the road with your wallet somewhat depleted, you belatedly realize that perhaps the rail option wasn’t so bad after all. The train experience is a bit like being in Purgatory, expecting to get to Heaven when it is over, only to find that you are in Hell when you hit the Irish roads! Satan is laughing at you mockingly as stokes the fires to greater intensity whilst wearing a baseball cap with NTR written on it!
National Toll Roads are a highway bandit company, who in cahoots with the Government, will call every 10- kilometre by-pass a motorway and put a tollbooth on it. So, by the time you transverse the country you have parted company with all your beer budget for the vacation, sat in seemingly endless traffic jams, and are the hapless victim of wacky Irish language road signage system that tells you that Daingean in Offaly has suddenly moved to where Dingle once was in Kerry. Let the sat-nav go figure that one out!
All of the above initial experiences, or nightmares, are delivered to you in the most part by state-controlled organizations.
Now just wait until the private hustlers get their hands on you!
Mom and Pop are waiting, so have a nice day!
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