Thu Aug 14, 2014 5:04 am
But Arriva Wales is something that people have to deal with day to day, They provide a public service that people throughout wales -north and south relay on.
It's true that private companies don't have to provide Welsh language services, but Carwyn made an exception due to the fact that in the end the railways are an essential service. Football isn't.
It's not "consistent", but what is consistent to you? Do you want him to complain to every company that puts signs out in public to be translated in Welsh? If that's the case perhaps we should follow in Québec's footprints, and make in a law that every company and organization has to have every single piece of written text in Welsh, above the English, with mandatory font sizes. Does that sound consistent to you? Though I get the feeling, looking at your past posts, that you would rather the Welsh government pull all funding for the language, because who needs it, really?
Of course, doing so would lead to a fracture within Welsh society, people went on hunger strikes to get a Welsh language broadcaster, they protest and continue to protest that the government isn't doing enough to secure a future for the language, and honestly they should, we probably aren't doing enough, I went though education doing the manditory Welsh lessons and from them I can't really remember anything at all, let alone having any level of fluency. We should be starting earlier, we should be providing opportunities for Welsh speakers to immerse themselves within the Welsh medium, to make sure that Welsh is no longer seen as a 2rd class language, and to try and reverse the damage that was created though generations of the "Welsh Not" and other such things.
And so, Carwyn, having what some people see as the absolute audacity to ask Arriva on Twitter to turn on Welsh announcements in Cardiff's second largest railway station, which had already been prerecorded years ago, for the decency of Welsh speaking people, many of whom feel more comfortable speaking and conversing in the medium of Welsh, is really the least he could of asked for.
Plus, Carwyn seemed a bit pissed at Arriva, but then of course he is, everyone is a bit pissed off at Arriva at this point, because other then Northern Rail perhaps, Arriva Wales is one of the worse train operating companies in the whole of the UK, everything about them, the horrible buses-on-rails trains they run up the valleys, the filthy, litter filled insides, the badly looked after stations run on a shoestring budget with an utter lack of even basic facilities, trains never being on time, then skipping stations in a desperate attempt to keep to the timetable, crowds of people in rush hour squished into tiny 2 car trains, 4 cars if your lucky. Then the fact that, even after the platforms were extended to accommodate 6 car trains, I've only ever seen a 6 car train run once -late at night, seamingly because they couldn't invest in buying a few more of the cheap, crappy buses-on-rails to run. The sooner we throw out Arriva and replace them with a publically run organisation of some sort (TFL would be a good model to follow) the better, plus hopefully when they do so they'll have Welsh language services legally cemented into the everyday running on the organisation, that way Carwyn won't have to act "inconsistently" as you put it.