Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland.
One of these days you'll arrive back from a fortnight in Lanzarote to find the entire island of Ireland hidden behind scaffolding. A length of green netting will be wrapped around the coastline. There will be a stern sign at customs warning you not to enter the country unless you are wearing a hard hat and goggles. A handful of men in high-visibility jackets will be staring down a hole where Athlone used to be.
The country has become a large building site. The sun can't reach the streets for the cranes. Bollards litter the roads. You have to bypass your own house just to get home. New houses are going up in back gardens of old houses. Old houses are being knocked down to be replaced by offices. Offices are being razed to make way for apartments. You try and grab a sandwich in Centra and you have to stand in line behind two dozen brickies. It's an astonishing fact that one in every eight Irish worker is now employed in the construction industry. Which means that if there are 16 people in your office right now, one of them should be guiding rubble down a giant chute while the other drinks a mug of tea and reads a copy of Nuts Magazine.
The work seems never-ending. There seems to be some clause in the contracts for public works which states that they should be finished no sooner than three years after the originally promised completion date and that costs should go up quicker than the buildings. Motorways are started, then halted, then built, then rebuilt, then widened, but first narrowed. Someone discovers a rare snail in a patch of mud at the exact point where the Carlow exit should be and everything gets held up for seven years. Most obviously, the traffic. Lone traffic lights are propped in the middle of country lanes, linked to a companion several miles down an empty road, and forever stuck on red. It seems that half our main roads are currently down to a single lane riddled with sudden hairpin chicanes and blind site exits. Signs have no shame in telling us to expect delays until 2011.
The skylines of our towns and cities can change almost overnight, which must be proving to be a nightmare for landscape painters. Meanwhile, many of those who bought a new house in the past five years live on half-finished estates, where the road is two feet below the curb and the green spaces are choked under a thick film of cement dust. We put up with it because we believe that someday we will wake up and the plastic wrapping will have been removed, the ribbons cut and that the country will look like one big show house. Then someone will spot a crack in a stretch of motorway somewhere. Or our children will decide that they don't like what we've done with the place.
And it will all begin again.