Madam, – Before the enterprising JC Bamford stuck a hydraulic back-hoe onto the back of an agricultural tractor 50 years ago and gave us the JCB as a synonym, at least among Irish media people, for mechanical excavators, the dominant name in excavators was the American Ruston Bucyrus company which marketed a range of track-mounted mechanical excavators with model numbers such as 10-RB , 19-RB , 22-RB etc, the numerals representing the size of the machine’s bucket in cubic feet.
Civil engineers and others involved in major construction in those days sometimes referred to a worker with a pick and shovel as a “1-RB” – the smallest unit of excavating-capability .
Reflecting on the recent bout of Arctic weather, one can recall TV images of snow-ploughs clearing main routes, of Army detachments chipping snow and ice from pavements in Dublin city-centre, of file-carrying executives trooping out of “co-ordination meetings” and of Evelyn Cusack threatening us with more snow if we didn’t behave, but nary a civilian 1-RB was to be seen, while pedestrian crossings and bus-halts remained choked with frozen snow, all for want of a shovel and a stout back.
Have municipalities become so sclerotic in their organisational structure that they cannot muster man-power to deal with such low-grade unscheduled challenges?
– Yours, etc,