Bored with France? Sick of the Algarve? Tired of the same old Canary Island sun trap where your uncle Padraic slowly turns into a bacon fry over the course of a week? Then might I suggest a weekend getaway on the M50, Dublin’s most immersive, fully enclosed travel experience?

The M50 has everything the discerning traveller could want. Culture? You’ll have plenty of time to absorb podcasts, audiobooks, and the complete works of Leonard Cohen while you crawl past Ballymount at 4km/h.

And the nightlife is surprisingly good.

The brake lights stretching from the Red Cow to the M7 interchange have a sort of Las Vegas quality about them, and you really do feel like you are at the centre of everything here.

It’s only a matter of time before U2 do a residency. And like all great travel destinations, you have some unforgettable local cuisine. The Centra near Liffey Valley does a mighty chicken fillet roll, and at the speed you’ll be travelling you could order it, eat it, and have a little nap before reaching the next junction.

The scenery is best described as ‘industrial chic,’ a concrete ribbon that loops around the city like Saturn’s rings, but this has not deterred the thousands of locals who have moved to M50 in their droves in recent years.

Though ethnically Irish, these permanent residents have a signature expression of concentrated dismay that marks them out from the rest of the population. You can see them making this expression huddled over the heated steering wheels of their cars as they listen to hours of drivetime radio, saluting each other over tepid travel mugs of forecourt coffee, the universe slowly expanding as they edge inexorably towards retirement. You too can pretend to be a local for a few days!

No passport required. No sunscreen. No fights over loungers or listening to Brits complaining about the language barrier. Just you, your car, and the slow, grinding acceptance that this is your life now.

Dublin’s M50: who knows, you just might never leave.

A squash and a squeeze

While I was stuck on the M50 and attempting to break through The Pale towards West Cork over the weekend, Tánaiste and Minister for Finance Simon Harris was on RTÉ’s This Week making noises about a new savings and investment scheme for the ‘squeezed middle’, which is one of those phrases politicians love because it sounds like they really care. There’s about €170 billion sitting in Irish deposit accounts earning approximately the same interest rate as a sock under the mattress, and Harris wants to get that money ‘working’.

Now, fair play to the man for acknowledging that the current tax regime on investments is not exactly encouraging. Deemed disposal, for the uninitiated, is the lovely rule where the government taxes you on gains you haven’t actually made yet, every eight years, like some sort of financial haunting. And if you do make a few bob on an ETF (exchange traded fund), the taxman takes 38% of it.

The original SSIAs, launched by Charlie McCreevy in 2001, gave savers a guaranteed 25% top-up from the government. Many of them matured just in time for the peak of the Celtic Tiger and the cash duly exploded all over patio heaters, decking, and second properties in Bulgaria. Harris has been very clear that this won’t be an SSIA.

What he’s proposing sounds more like a tax break on investing, modelled on schemes in Canada and Sweden, which is grand but most of us can barely save enough to put a deposit on a potato, let alone take a spring on the NASDAQ.

A hole in one for Micheál

You’ll be glad to know your taxes are also hard at work in the international gift-giving department. Records released under FOI reveal that Taoiseach Micheál Martin presented Donald Trump with a personalised golf tee and marker set in a wooden box during last year’s St Patrick’s Day jaunt to Washington, at a cost of €735. In fairness, what else do you get the man who has everything, including his own Board of Peace?

Trump, being a famous teetotaller, missed out on the whiskey which instead found its way to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The man who has spent the past four years dodging Russian missiles, not to mention Trump’s verbal missiles, got a bottle of Green Spot at Shannon Airport last February and a 12-year-old Redbreast in December. You wouldn’t begrudge him a dropeen.

The games people play

And finally, the Spanish Catholic Church, faced with the fact that only 18% of weddings in Spain now take place in a church (down from 55% in 2007), has done what any reasonable institution would do: launched a video game. Level Up!

The Game of Two follows a fictional couple navigating stag parties, exes, and work problems while learning about patience and integrity. While not exactly Sonic The Hedgehog, it’s probably got a better chance of success than a twenty-hour pre-marriage course. For better or worse, eh?