Foreign registered vehicles

Foreign Nationals Driving

The Latvians who parked outstide my house were in receipt of Social Welfare rent allowance to the tune of €1,300 per month and drove an Audi A4. There are also more of them living in the house than should be.

I reckon they did not want me to involve the Gardai in case it led to something else from Customs or Social Welfare.

foreign nationals driving

There was a bad crash in Tipperary last year which i girl died. The crash was caused by the lativan car driving on the wrong side of the road and they had drink on them.

I have heard this crap from the Cops as well.

To the effect that it is too difficult to translate Latvian so the cops refuse to enforce.

Why dont they impound the cars that have been here illegally or have been driven illegally at high speeds and let the Latvian bring their own translator down to explain things at their expense.

Funnily the case I know about (moron trashed the side of a parked car and pleaded no English ) was a Latvian as well but the affected driver rang customs who impounded the car , a 2000 BMW . His English had come on splendidly by the time he paid for the damage a week later.

The Poles and Lituanians and Slovaks, all of whom appear on the Roads nowadays , seem to be better drivers than the Latvians .

Re: Is this thread bordering on racism?

I am not sure if this response should be here or in LOS so mods please feel free to move or delete if appropriate. - I do not want to hijack this thread nor for it to descend into the farcical ranting and raving and polemics that usually accompany this subject matter in LOS.

It is my personal feeling that this thread and the comments of a number of contributors to this thread borders on racism and that the comments and posts by some people are symptomatic of a kind of "soft racism" practiced by Irish people.

Racism is defined by dictionary.com as "The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability ..."

I feel that by attaching ethnic descriptions to the negative behaviour of people we are (re)enforcing negative stereotypes about people and about different ethnic groups and that this is a form of racism.

If we continually use and accept such negative stereotypes they will gradually, over time, harden into much stronger feelings against certain ethnic backgrounds.

I believe that we should be actively working against this happening so that our children will grow up being tolerant of and open too people of other ethnic backgrounds.

My personal litmus test when I hear or read these kind of comments is to change the context slightly and see what impact this has - ie change African / Latvian etc., to Irish and to assume that the majority of posters are based in the UK - this, as an example only and I'm not picking on Tonka, gives us a statement along the lines of

The Welsh and Scots and French, all of whom appear on the British Roads nowadays , seem to be better drivers than the Irish .

I think the point I am trying to make in a bad and long winded way, is that whenever we differentiate based on nationality or ethnicity we are are not defeating racism but rather promoting it.

Now, before the flaming starts, I want to make clear that a. I do not think that this is deliberate on the part of the people posting ie I don't think anyone sets out to be deliberately racist and b. I myself am no angel nor paragon of virtue and have said similar and worse on many occasions.

efm

emf

i agree with your points. my initial reply to Setanta was certainly triggered by the fact that being a non-national whenever I see statements where 'all foreigners drive without insurance' I pretty much see red. Having lived here for 10 years I have seen and read in the papers that most crime in this country is certainly not perpetrated by non nationals. While I do understand that Setanta was merely reporting something told by someone else (a Garda!) I still find these vague generalisation don't really help anyone. As Clubman stated, a black person is not necessarily African, an uninsured driver is not necessarily Latvian...and I may add greedy, thieving landlords are not necessarily Irish...

Re: emf

Think it is time to lock tread, bytw I agree with last two posts.

Take the trip on 22/4/04