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Snakes and ladders: It was the best of years, it was the worst of years

GOOD YEAR Have we really reached the stage where we're too busy to chop our own onions, peel our own potatoes or even brown …

Mon Dec 29 2008 - 00:00

GOOD YEARHave we really reached the stage where we're too busy to chop our own onions, peel our own potatoes or even brown our own mince? Apparently. TV chef Delia Smith (below) made a mint when she published a book - accompanied by a BBC series - suggesting people take a series of unlikely shortcuts en route to very fast food.

In How to Cheat at CookingSmith recommended a particular brand of frozen mash, tinned lamb from Marks Spencer, pre-chopped onions from one source and pre-chopped vegetables from another. It remains to be seen if such pricey options will remain popular in 2009.

• Vehicle Registration Tax (VRT)was changed and is no longer based on a car's engine size but on how much carbon dioxide it emits. Car prices fell but the numbers willing to splash out fell by more, which led to a number of high-profile dealers closing their doors.

• Enterprise Irelandannounced €20 million in funding for the establishment of a National Functional Foods Research Centre. The centre will bring together four of the biggest food groups in the country - Dairygold Food Ingredients, Glanbia Nutritionals, Carbery and Kerry Ingredients Ireland - to maximise the commercial value of milk. The companies will work with researchers from UCD, UCC, UL and Teagasc to enhance foods (including infant formula, dairy spreads, yogurts and cheese) with extra nutrients.

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• In order to encourage more people to cycle, Minister for Finance Brian Lenihanis to give tax breaks to cyclistsand their employers. Beginning in January, employees working for participating companies - the scheme is voluntary - can choose a bicycle and any associated safety equipment up to a maximum value of €1,000 which the employer will then buy; the purchase will be treated as a tax-exempt benefit-in-kind.

• Foodies savoured the news that perfectly edible crooked, bent or twisted fruit and vegetables were back on the menu across Europe. "This marks the new dawn for the curvy cucumber and the knobbly carrot," said EU agriculture commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel. "We simply don't need to regulate this. In these days of high food prices and general economic difficulties, consumers should be able to choose from the widest range of products possible."

BAD YEAR

• Pity the poor Munster fanswho booked trips to Cardiff after their team qualified for the Heineken Cup final in May. Prices for flights to the cities closest to Cardiff increased by as much as 1,000 per cent after Munster's semi-final victory. Some flights from Shannon to Bristol, a short hop away from the Welsh capital, had price tags in excess of €550, while flights out of Dublin were over €450.

• In January, Minister for the Environment John Gormleywas still planning to ban traditional lightbulbs, but the year was just weeks old when it became clear that his ban would be impossible to implement until it was agreed EU-wide, since there would be nothing to stop a retailer sourcing bulbs in another state.

• A study of people's mobile phone habits, carried out by UK price comparison website moneysupermarket.com, found that confusion over phone tariffsin the UK could be costing Britain's 65 million phone users a colossal £8 billion(€10.75bn) a year. It said many phone users were clueless about how many free minutes or free text messages were included in the phone packages they had, or even how long they spent talking and texting each month. With many of the same mobile operators doing business here, similar confusion could be costing Irish phone users tens of millions of euro annually.

• It wasn't a good year for bottled water. On a BBC Panorama special in February, UK environment minister Phil Woolas said it was "morally unacceptable to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on bottled water when we have pure drinking water [and] at the same time one of the crises facing the world is the supply of water". Thames Water, supported by Friends of the Earth and the British government, launched a campaign aimed at persuading restaurants, pubs and hotels to make tap water more easily available to customers. The people of Galwayand Ennisand a number of other spots where tap water was found to be undrinkable were unconvinced.

• E-tolling on the M50 became a reality, and when the NRA warned that motorists would face "teething problems" with the new system, it wasn't lying. Weeks after it was introduced, the Department of Transport admitted it still had a failure rate of around 10 per cent. The system was failing to read tags or misreading them. Motorists complained about getting bills for journeys they did not make and those who tried to pay had difficulty getting anyone to take their money.