Meanwhile on the Roads...

Another seemed confused that someone from Ireland wouldn't know that Mallow doesn't have taxis freely available, I put this down to people from Cork presuming (mass generalisation) that everyone loves Cork and knows things like this.

I suspect you're looking at this the wrong way around. They'd more likely assumed that everyone knows Mallow doesn't have taxis freely available because we don't have anything like that outside the Greater Dublin Area and the city centres of Cork and Limerick. Honestly, that's way bigger than a "Cork" thing. I wouldn't expect taxis at Killarney, Tralee etc and I would not be surprised if there no taxis at Limerick rank upon arrival.

We don't get things like integrated transport systems around the rest of the country and I've seen lots of times where Dublin people I know have had a shock by the infrastructure/services gap. It's like a London person arriving to Dublin and wondering where the tube station is: "in our dreams pal, that's where it is". I know it's reasonable to expect these things, but we're coming from a very low base here!

Synopsis: when you're from "de stix" you quickly learn that when it comes to transport you can take nothing for granted!

Difficult to prove, and doesn't even need interaction. You see a lot of phone cradles stuck to the windscreen. Apart from the usual idiots watching Netflix etc, all it would take would be a WhatsApp notification popping up on the screen and the driver taking their eyes off the road to read the message, all without touching the phone. You could only perhaps prove that a message was received within minutes of the estimated time of the incident (as I don't think the exact time of the collision would be known)

Don't suppose it matters now, Nolan was determined to let this woman off lightly regardless.

And when there's feck all taxi drivers on their apps the public will say bye bye to those same apps. Joe and Josephine will likely be unvetted and it won't take much for mr/mrs general public to realise their lives are worth more than the few quid savings

We're not like other countries, we require individual taxi drivers to be licenced, most other countries have no such requirement

I wish them luck, they'll need it with the way our regulations are so tight, I can see the regulator ruling that the taxis have to be able to make what's on their meter, even if that means Uber make up the difference between what we pay on the fixed price

As it stands the system is quite good, there are certainly taxis that take the "long way" to improve their income from a particular journey when they hear the yank accents. I see no issue with a fixed price where a taxi can legally get his/her share