You have to love this country.

Under no circumstances though should you take it seriously or else you would weep in sheer frustration.

I refer of course to the Powers that Be, and their uncanny ability to make a right bollox of everything.

There have been quite a few examples of this.

There was the PULSE fiasco for starters.  PULSE stands for “Police Using Leading Systems Effectively” which turned out to to be one of the greatest misnomers of all times.  Whoever thought up that name had a wicked sense of humour!  Initially costing over €60 million back in ’01 with a further €13 million just to get it working properly it is only just coming into general use.

But if you think that’s bad, I give you Ireland’s Electronic Voting.  This little gem cost us €50 million despite everyone pointing out that it had too many flaws [for starters it used Windows 95, for fucks sake].  Having bought all the equipment it was all promptly put into storage for many years before finally being sold as scrap for seventy grand.  A nice little loss leader?

There was also the Port Tunnel [€752 million].  This was a nice little idea to drive a tunnel from the heart of Dublin out to the M50 ring motorway, thereby removing heavy lorries from the city streets.  It wasn’t until they had finished it that they discovered it wasn’t big enough to take the larger vehicles and caused such chaos on the M50 that part of it had to be rebuilt.

I mentioned last year how they were fucking up the traffic in Dublin by introducing trams into streets already jammed with cars, buses, taxis, cyclists and pedestrians [and that was another €380 million].  Indeed it did fuck things up mightily and when the trams finally started running they brought the city centre to a standstill.  Something had to be done.  They had to re-route a shed load of bus routes just to get the trams moving again.

This week apparently they decided to increase traffic on the Luas [tram] by introducing longer trains to carry more passengers.  “It will work!” they screamed. “We have done all the calculations and there will be no problems.“.  However, someone managed to use a faulty tape measure, or missed a decimal point or something because once again they have fucked up royally.

You see, the trams have to cross the Liffey at O’Connell Bridge.  But when a tram heading north gets stopped by the traffic lights on the North Quays, the southern end of the train nicely blocks the South Quays [who have simultaneously received a green light].  This means that the entire South Quays remain blocked until the lights change, whereupon the tram can move but South Quays now have the red light again, so the quays are still blocked.

Seriously lads.  If you really want to fuck things up, just ask our Lords and Masters.  They really are geniuses when it comes to miscalculation and lack of foresight.

And don’t worry about the cost.

That will just be passed on to the tax payer.