Living in Eire…
When we bought our house, there was a public road that you could drive on to get to it. It was one lane, and in poor condition, but it existed. Sadly, that road was maintained by our local County Council, who they say they’re so broke, they can’t even send a grumpy old man to dump a bucket of tar and some paving chips into the massive voids we are forced to drive over.
That being said, there are so many massive potholes that nothing short of a week-long round-the-clock, 24/7, bucket-brigade parade of dumpy old men would make the mess passable – and only a complete reconstruction is going to make the disaster safe to drive on. Needless to say, this lack-of-a-road situation is not helping the area’s currently negative equity property values.
In the meantime, the County Council has kindly made us all aware that any individual who personally fills these potholes is personally liable to being sued by drivers who may have accidents on the repaired sections of road. Strangely, if we leave the roads as is and have an accident, the County Council says they are NOT liable for accident damages caused by the state of our supposed “roads”.
This has got me thinking about the many reasons why living in Ireland is different than living in other ostensibly “First World” nations. Aside from the lack of drivable roads, we also have some pretty serious issues with our unstable, overpriced, and inaccessible communications infrastructure.
Where I live (an hour south of Dublin), ordinary landline telephone service sometimes works… and sometimes doesn’t. We cancelled of our landline telephone service last year after waiting a month for our dead line to be repaired. Miraculously, once we’d cancelled it, the line was working again within the week – but predictably dead again by the following week. However, our service providers were so desperate to keep the account that they continued to leave the line operational (off and on) for a further six months until we finally refused to pay for it, and even then, they continued to bill us for a further six months.
Eircom, our mobile telephony provider tells us we have perfect coverage, but everyone who calls us spends half the conversation saying “you’re breaking up… what did you say?” My definition of “perfect coverage” is apparently different from Eircom Mobile’s definition of the phrase.
As for the digital realm, broadband Internet access is not available. Full stop. Vodafone, 3, O2, and Meteor all tried to sell us mobile dongles that got no signal anywhere near our house; Eircom offered to reinstall our landline, with absolutely NO guarantee that it would be able to carry a data signal; and the company we bought our satellite system from went out of business – leaving us with some very expensive and ugly satellite receivers up our roof.
The latest craze has been the National Broadband Scheme, or NBS, a government sponsored program that intends to make Internet access available to thousands of people who live outside of Dublin, Galway & Cork. It sounded good when we bought in. It cost the same as a regular telephony based service (meaning we didn’t have to pay for the satellite dish), and is supposed to allow us to download 10 gigs per month for a regular monthly fee that’s about equal to what we would pay if our phone company had an infrastructure capable of providing digital access. That’s the theory.
In reality, the service is shite. Anytime I allow my computer to download any sort of update, I lose my connection completely. As of today, it’s been dead for a week. The provider says we’ve exceeded our Fair Usage Limit – which is 10 gigs per month, 1.5 gigs per week, 560 Megs per day, 180 Megs per 4-hour period, or 90 Megs per hour. In other words, if I bought an album online I would automatically exceed my usage, which means my service would “slow down” – in other words, be shut off – for at least 24 hours, and possibly longer. The provider, 3, can’t tell us how much longer. This time, it has been a week.
Great fun when one is trying to run a business.
So, here we are…. Living an hour outside the nation’s capital, with no telephone landline, lousy mobile coverage, Internet access that gets shut down if we use it, and frozen roads so dangerous to navigate that we’re afraid to leave the house to buy wood for the fire. This doesn’t feel like life in First World country.
Having been there recently, I can honestly say that rural Mexico – three hours from their capital by plane – has better roads, better phone services, and better Internet access. It wasn’t so long ago that the radio here was telling us our government had multi-million euro budget surpluses. Yet, in less time than it takes to gestate an elephant – we’ve gone from surpluses to the brink of national bankruptcy.
The only question that remains is obvious – where did the Irish economy go?
