Emissions/Kilian Doyle: The last thing a man needs on returning to his homeland and attempting to slide back into the daily drudge as painlessly as possible is to be confronted with something so idiotic, so blatantly money-grabbing, so petty and so self-defeating that it makes him want to jump right back on a plane.
So what do I get? A proposal by Iarnród Éireann to charge commuters to use car-parks in DART stations. It's as if the whole Park and Ride campaign was never dreamed up, as if the posters hadn't been plastered over every station from Greystones to Malahide for months, even years.
What's the point in proposing that motorists Park and Ride if there's nowhere to park and nothing to ride? Now, I realise that this cunning plan was subsequently withdrawn once aul' Mr Brennan got wind of it and drew his claws. (A classic politician, he hasn't been in Government for over a decade for nothing.) What did they expect? Hadn't they already been warned off last year, shelving plans for parking charges at more than 30 stations?
The fact that Irish Rail was even considering charging the average customer up to € 5 a day for the privilege of doing something they'd been widely encouraging him or her to do for months smacks of crass opportunism.
It says there is a problem with spaces being taken up by non-DART users. Please. Ask anyone who uses Malahide DART station. The car-park is full by 7.30 a.m. every morning. What shopper is going to arrive at 7 a.m. and sit in the car for two hours until the shops open?
And have these people never been to Booterstown station? It's like entering some bizarre timewarp - there's nothing there, unless you count a few wee local shops, a pub and a grotty bird sanctuary inhabited by chronically depressed herons, psychotic mallards and miserable coots (who get enough bad press so I'll leave 'em alone). So, unless Iarnród Éireann expects us to believe the car-park is filled with vehicles owned by alcoholic birdwatchers, it can pull the other one.
But it's only three stations, it cries. I seem to remember something similar emanating from a certain moustachioed Austrian dictator . . . "Ah, sure it's only Poland."
So there it is, knuckles rapped, standing in the corner like a scolded kid, plotting its revenge. God only knows what'll come up next - umbrella carriage tariffs and schoolbag taxes anyone?
While we're on the subject of bizarre modes of squeezing every last penny out of the long-suffering motorist, I nearly choked when I saw this headline the other day - €150 scrap levy to hit price of cars". Crikey, said I, before apologising to the cat for spitting my breakfast all over him.
The money will, apparently, go towards recovering vehicles that are, in classic EU-speak, so delicately dubbed "end of life". (Sounds like something they'd say in an ultra-PC old folks' home.)
In layman's terms, it means you and I (more likely you, in fairness, as not even I, in my wildest flights of fancy, can envisage buying a new car on a hack's wages) will be paying to scrap the crocks dumped by farmers who couldn't find some unfortunate motoring columnist to buy their 15-year-old Escort.
Let me get this right again - you want me to pay for something now just in case it needs to be saved later? Sounds suspiciously like Catholicism to me . . .