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Toll Bridge Charges: Up and Down

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Toll Bridge Charges: Up and Down

If you drive a car, you definitely will have heard of the West-Link and the East-Link toll bridges, The West-Link is on the M50 near Lucan and the East-Link connects Ringsend with the Point Village/Dublin Port area and brings you now to the M1 tunnel.

Back in the 1980s when they were built, Ireland was a LOT poorer and corruption was even more prevalent than later and so the Irish Government got a private company to build the bridges and gave them the right to charge the people using the road a toll on an ongoing basis.

It was a very profitable business and in the end the National Roads Authority (now called Transport Infrastructure Ireland) bought the West-Link Bridge in 2008 and Dublin City bought the East Link bridge in 2015 from the private companies. So now the bridges are NOT in private ownership anymore, instead they are now owned by the state / Dublin City and since WE are the state or the City, and it would make sense to stop charging a toll, but not so fast!!! Neither the Irish government nor Dublin City wanted to stop charging that extra tax on us, so we are still paying for something that already has been paid.

National Toll Road who originally built the West Link made a profit of more than EUR 1bn from it!!!! Read it here!

Dublin City tried to claim that removing the toll plaza at the East Link would be too expensive, therefore they had to keep it and had to continue charging money. A very ….unique…..argumentation.

In 2010 Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) and Dublin City were told that they will have to pay VAT to Revenue from the toll they charge. At the West-Link, back then the toll was not increased, but remained the same and TII paid the VAT from that amount. Dublin City on the other hand increased the toll by 21% (VAT was back then 21% and is now 23%).

TII went to court over the VAT and now the European Court of Justice has decided that VAT should NOT be paid to state-owned companies and immediately the PR spin started.

TII declared that they will leave the charges as they were because they absorbed the VAT when it was added to the toll price and didn’t increase the charges back then. There is some merit in that argument because on paper the toll stayed the same all the time, but commercial companies were able to claim the VAT back so they now have to pay more. In addition the question has to be asked how TII was able to absorb the VAT. If they didn’t need the 23% at that time and had no problem absorbing it then it looks like they just increased their profit margin by the 23%. In addition there is another little aspect that is normally overlooked: When the bridge was owned by the private company, they had to pay VAT, when then NRA took over in 2008, they didn’t have to pay VAT anymore before the 2010 ruling but they decided NOT to lower the toll, So strictly speaking the NRA NEVER absorbed the VAT ans therefore they are in essence INCREASING the toll now.

Dublin City on the other hand was even cheekier! They send out a press release claiming that they were lowering the toll charges! But they are not! Sure the charges are going down by the amount they had added a few years ago, but that was because they had to stop charging something that they were not allowed anymore to charge (i.e. VAT). So while the charges went down it was not at all oh-so-generous Dublin City that decided to lower the charges, they were TOLD to stop charging a VAT surcharge.

We don’t need to go to Washington DC to see how spin works! ;-)

Dublin, Dublin City Council, Taxes, Traffic, , , , , ,

Dangerous Brazilian Au-Pair???

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Dangerous Brazilian Au-Pair???

An unbelievable story emerged on Thursday about a 24 year old Brazilian ex-Au pair that wanted to visit her former host family and instead was put into prison.

Paloma Aparezida Silva-Carvalho from Sao Paulo was in Switzerland to visit her boy friend and then had planned to come to Ireland to visit her former host family in Galway. She had worked here before as an au pair for 18 months in 2015/2016 and now intended to come back to stay with the family for 2 months. Immigration officers at Dublin airport, however, were convinced that she wanted to enter the country to work illegally and therefore arrested her and out her in prison where she was strip searched and locked in a cell overnight. :-O

The host family was contacted and confirmed that she was expected to come for holidays, but the immigration officers still decided to send her to prison and told her that she would be sent back to Switzerland the next day.

Now the information in the newspapers doesn’t seem to be fully congruent and the Independent and the Irish Times have told the the story in slightly different ways and have changed the story during the day, but here are some details that were reported:
1) Brazilian citizens do not need a visa to visit Ireland as long as they will stay less than 90 days
2) Paloma had a booked return flight and had EUR 1000 cash with her, so there was plenty of money and clear intention to leave

The EUR 1000 was not mentioned anymore in a later version of the Irish Times story. Also in an earlier version the Irish Times reported that the former Au Pair had decided to leave Ireland immediately once she got released from prison with a permission to stay for just 10 days. But a later version explained that the family actually did collect her and the 10 days reference wasn’t there anymore.

Sooo, we don’t know all the details by the looks of it and even the newspapers don’t really seem to know, but what must have happened there?

A young woman arrives from a foreign country. She worked here before and now came without a work permit. But she planned to stay for a relatively long period of time (2 months) and school holidays are also that long, so there is a possibility that she will look after the kids of the host family during that time. And there is a possibility that the host family will give her some pocket money or even pay her some proper salary. Yes, all this is possible, but it is also possible that food and bed would have been the only pay OR that she was not expected to WORK.

Let’s assume for a moment that the arrangement was that the girl will look after the kids and will get a bit of money for it. Yes, strictly speaking this is work and she needs a work visa. But come-on, are we THAT petty about it now? That girl would not have damaged the Irish economy nor would she have taken another person’s job, not would she have to pay any taxes because over the year the bit of money would have been to low to get her in the claws of the revenue commissioner. So I really think the immigration officers totally overreacted because there is the definite possibility that no employment or formal work was planned.

Sure rules are rules and an immigration officer doesn’t have the power to interpret the rules, he/she just has to apply them. But let’s be honest, they INTERPRET rules every single day and in this case they interpreted the rules unnecessarily strict.

I hope Paloma Aparezida Silva-Carvalho will have a good time in Ireland and I hope she will get a nice bit of pocket money from the family when she leaves and if she looks after the kids. But I think we should apologise to her for a totally unreasonable treatment and the responsible immigration officer should be sent on a humanity training course!

P.S: And here is another story that was reported on the SAME day: A 24 year old guy met an 18 year old Spanish girl in town. They spent some time together, but later he allegedly held her against her will and repeatedly raped her on the former Irish Glass Bottle site near Irishtown over two days. The guy is already on bail for some serious public order crime awaiting a trial, but after he was interviewed by the police, they released him with no criminal charges brought against him, but inquiries will continue.

So a totally harmless and innocent Brazilian girl who wants to visit an upstanding family will be thrown into jail because she MIGHT work here, but a guy that might have raped a girl and who is awaiting trial for a serious public order offence is free to roam the streets. WTF!?!?!?!

 

Dublin, Justice, Odd, Tourism, , , , , ,

Dublinbikes will get a new sponsor

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Dublinbikes will get a new sponsor

Coke Zero is gone and Just Eat will arrive as the new sponsor of the Dublinbikes. New ad stickers will be put on the bikes and the website will change and Dublin City will call it differently, but nobody in their right mind ever called the bikes any different than “Dublinbikes” and the new sponsor will not change anything about that either.

The advertisement contract will be for three years and while the amount that Just Eat will pay has not been released, we can assume that it is probably in the region of 2 mio.

There are currently nearly 69,000 subscribers at a yearly fee of EUR 25, a budget of 1.725 mio and if the advertisement costs 2mio, there is a total amount of 3.7mio available, which seems like a LOT of money! At the end of the summer there will be 116 bike stations with a total of 1600 bikes

www.thejournal.ie/dublinbikes-brand-new-sponsor-3506804-Jul2017/

Dublin, Dublin City Council

Dublin is booming: Temple Bar Pub and Guinness Storehouse

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Dublin is booming: Temple Bar Pub and Guinness Storehouse

Two media reports last week seem to indicate that Dublin is booming again. We had that before, but will it last this time?

The first one here, is about the Temple Bar Pub and the fact that it made a profit of EUR 3.29m last year, with a gross profit of EUR 10.3m. That is a HELL of a lot of pints even at crazy Temple Bar prices. Since the gross profit is the total revenue minus the cost of goods, the actual cost for the drink has already been subtracted. And if you divide that amount by 363, then you come to a gross profit of more than 28k per DAY!

And in the second report here, the Guinness Storehouse has announced that they will spend EUR 16m to expand the Storehouse, which includes a plan to double the size of the Gravity Bar on top of the building. Works will start in the beginning of 2018 and will be finished by 2019. Coincidentally the amount they will invest is “just” EUR 1 per visitor for ALL visitors since 2000: 16.5m visitors came to the Storehouse since it opened in 2000.

There is clearly a lot of money in Dublin…at least the pub and pub/drink-related businesses seem to have it.

Dublin, Economy, , ,

Free Wednesday is going, going, nearly gone!

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Free Wednesday is going, going, nearly gone!

This week it is not a really “odd” topic, but some bad news. If you follow the daily Dublin Event Guide posts on Facebook, you already found out that the Free Wednesday, the one day a month when in the past all state owned and OPW (Office of Public Works)-managed heritage sites were free, did get hollowed out in a bad way for us in Dublin.

Last year the hugely popular Kilmainham Gaol was taken off the list: No more free visits to the Gaol. Because of the very much increased interest due to the 1916/2016 festivities and after a very expensive renovation I could see where they were coming from with that decision. But now Dublin Castle was ALSO taken off the list of free sites on the first Wednesday of the month and I can see that just being the start!!

My prediction is that other sites outside of Dublin will follow in the next few months.

The Free Wednesday (originally it was just called “First Wednesday”) was introduced by Brian Hayes, the junior minister in charge of the OPW, in 2011 to get more people to visit heritage sites. It had exactly that effect! So it worked! If you live in a place, most of us visit the sites less than if we go on holidays somewhere else, so it was mainly for Irish people to learn more about the country and cities around us. Sure, the visitors benefit from it as well, but I think that was an accepted consequence, not the main purpose of the introduction of the First/Free Wednesday.

Is it a coincidence that just a few days after a new junior minister takes over responsibility for the OPW the rules for the First Wednesday get changed? Kevin Moran (who oddly calls himself “Boxer” because he punched and knocked down another boy on a  football field when he was 12) took over at the end of June and immediately the rules changed. Do I think that he CAUSED that change? No, probably not! Maybe the OPW management disliked the (politically motivated) First Wednesday for a long time and took the opportunity to railroad the new an inexperienced guy as soon as he arrived.

I think it is a wrong decision!

Just a few days before that not-at-all publicised decision to take Dublin Castle off the list (I only found out because I smelled a rat and rang Dublin Castle.) another decision was publicised WIDELY and without holding back: Children until the age of 12 will get free admission to OPW sites from now on. Before the age limit was 6 years of age. This is a good decision, but I’d say it costs MUCH less than the Free Wednesday and it consequently saves people who are interested in going to heritage sites much less as well.

Dublin, Events, Tourism, , , , ,
 
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