Don't you just love myths? You know the sort of thing I mean: Scots/Jews are mean; Irishmen are drunks; Frenchmen are great lovers; Manchester United is the biggest club in the world; the Premiership is the best/toughest/most exciting league in the world; America and Britain had no option but to bomb Iraq; all the bombs hit their targets; that sort of thing, the harmless stuff of potty, endless pub arguments.
My favourite myth of the moment is that Dublin has a traffic problem. Now that's a beauty. Anyone who has travelled to any major European or North American city will readily attest that, compared with most places, there is no great weight of traffic on Dublin's streets. There only appears to be. No, Dublin does not have a traffic problem - Dublin has a traffic management problem, which is a different thing altogether.
To solve the self-fulfilling chaos engendered by this myth, Dublin is about to spend several hundred million pounds building Luas, a light rail, on-street transport system that will tear the heart out of the city, threaten a commercial catastrophe for city-centre traders, uproot goodly parts of suburbia, and create, for the years it will take to build, the very traffic conditions it is being set up to alleviate. Countless people will suffer high blood-pressure at the wheels of their cars.
This, of course, is all being done at the behest of the car-hating, bicycle-riding, Green-voting Sandalistas, snug in Dublin 4 or 6 or Temple Bar while sniffing their superiority over a carrot juice at those of us who dare to admit to enjoying suburban life - and, dear God, to driving.
Dublin Corporation
I have news for them, and for the Minister for the Environment, Dublin Corporation, Dublin's City Manager, the Garda Siochana, Uncle Tom Cobley and all: I will save you £250 million over the next few years (probably £500 million by the time it's complete) and all I want in return is a paltry 20 per cent commission, deposited, of course, in my Grand Cayman account.
If you want Dublin's traffic to flow freely, this is what you do.
1. Ban all deliveries to city-centre stores between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. Other cities do it, so why not Dublin? Let the traders pay the overtime to staff for opening early. It'll be a lot cheaper for them than the millions they'll lose when the Luas Big Dig gets underway.
2. Ban all deliveries to pubs between the same hours. If there's a traffic jam on a Dublin street you can bet your life you'll eventually (very eventually) come across a great big bloody beer lorry dumping barrels onto a bagful of hay. After all, it's not as if the pubs close at 5 p.m. To hell with the additional cost; the breweries and the pubs can afford it - especially with their rip-off prices (but that's another Diary!).
Nobel Prize
3 .This suggestion is so simple it beggars belief. It will undoubtedly earn me a Nobel Prize (well, if Trimble can win one. . ). Make it a criminal offence to park against the flow of traffic. How many times have you been crawling down a narrow street only to see some nutcase create gridlock by forcing his way across from one side to the other, jamming two flows at once. Clamp the bastards, I say. They'll soon stop.
4. Tow away any car that takes up even one inch of a bus-stop bay. These people are enemies of the State. And fine, then sack any Dublin Bus driver who refuses to properly pull into the now-empty bus stop. Don't you love those bus drivers who force their passengers to walk three yards to the pavement in order to block as much traffic as they can? Freeing the bus stops will give them no excuses.
5. Synchronise the traffic lights. It is obvious to me that Dublin's traffic lights pattern has been developed by a none-too-subtle roads engineering department determined to cause chaos in order to force its maniacal road-building schemes through, around and under the city. What else can explain lights at major junctions which allow three cars through before turning red again; pedestrian lights which take no cognisance of major junctions just 100 yards down the road; lights which immediately break down on those few occasions every year that it rains?
Double parking
6. Introduce capital punishment for double-parkers. These eejits seem to think that flashing hazard-lights gives them licence to stop wherever they want. Hang them, I say, right next to the people who gave clampers the right to mug poor motorists who overstay their welcome at parking meters but who cause no obstruction. By all means clamp people who cause an obstruction - but then, that was never the purpose of the exercise, was it, you rotten gougers?
There, I feel better already. Now, 20 per cent of £250 million amounts to, hey, £50 million. If I hire Charlie's accountants and don't pay any tax, I'll just about be able to purchase Fergus McCann's Celtic shares, which, added to the ones I already own, will give me a controlling interest in the biggest soccer club on the planet. Now, that's no myth.