Good Old Boy #15

From The Guardian, Jacques Barrot, the European Commissioner for Transport:

"Late for the meeting, he grabbed hold of the briefing document which had been prepared by officials in DG Transport - the civil servants who work for a commissioner but usually in a completely different part of Brussels. Jabbing his papers with a red pencil, Mr Barrot slowly read out paragraphs word-for-word for the first time to himself and to his audience.

When he did not understand something, he would furiously underline a paragraph and yell out that the DG was to blame. Sitting at a glass table in his grand office which is decorated with what must be one of the world's most impressive train sets - models of Europe's fastest trains on tiny rail tracks - he would then bury his head back on the document to read out the statistics.

Mr Barrot said that Irish roads were not that good, though in "northeast Ireland" the roads are much better. When it was pointed out that "northeast Ireland" is better known as Northern Ireland and lies in the United Kingdom, which historically has better roads than the Republic of Ireland, he appeared not be familiar with the partition of Ireland."