Well, of course Maxol welcomes the decision of that bizarre body, the National Roads Authority, to oppose service stations along the edges of our motorways.
What a relief for Maxol! No worries about competition on the new roads, no costly investment in sites, no threat to existing stations - indeed quite the reverse. Instead of petrol stations being built where the cars go, yet again we have found an Irish solution to an Irish problem: the cars must go where the petrol stations are.
Jimmy Quinn of the National Road Haulage Association declares that there are no service stations from Portlaoise to the Border: I'm not sure that's quite right, James. There's a service station at Kill on the N7 - but after that there's certainly nothing until you enter Northern Ireland at Killeen. And who exactly owns all the petrol stations that cluster around you beseechingly in South Armagh, like beggars at a Bombay railway station? Hmmm. I wonder.
The NRA's justification for the ban on motorway service stations is that journeys in Ireland are short. Well, that's probably because people are always running out of petrol. But no one can call the distance from Kill to Killeen "short": it is about 80 miles, and a safely full fuel gauge at Kill could be empty as the car put-put-puts to a halt somewhere near Ravensdale. Two o'clock in the morning; and in the dark, a woman sits alone in her fuel-less car. What is she to do? Well, ring the NRA hotline, of course, where she will probably be told to push her vehicle to those nice people north of the Border.
The NRA says that it "will" develop a signage policy so that drivers will be able to find service areas and other facilities available in the towns and villages adjacent to the national road network. Good. But whence this word "will"? If this policy of not allowing service stations on major arterial routes was decided on years ago, why was the vital signage policy not developed before the roads were built? Why is the NRA only now deciding that maybe it would be a good idea to erect signs to tell people where to find petrol?
The Letters page of this newspaper has recently been hosting a correspondence about the virtues of state control, as in dear old Scandinavia. Well, actually we've had state control in Ireland - loads of it. The privately owned Dublin tramway company, founded by William Martin Murphy, was the finest public transport service in Europe a century ago, and representatives of Swiss and German urban transport companies came to Dublin to gawp in awe at its punctuality and efficiency.
Sixty years ago it was nationalised to form part of that splendid conglomerate CIE, which over the following decades set standards of ineptitude and slovenliness which would have done credit to the high achievers in those particular art forms within the Kinshasa Bus, Tram and Ass-Cart Company.
Other signal triumphs for state-run companies in Ireland include Bord na Móna, with its company headquarters in the centre of Dublin 50 miles away from its centre of operations; the ESB, which managed to produce the most expensive electricity in Europe; and P&T, which, if you were lucky, could provide your grandchildren with a telephone - provided you got in an application in your late teens. Oh yes, and there was B&I, which ran a sort of maritime theme-park in which on even a calm day you could undergo the Dunkirk experience for the price of a cross-channel ferry ticket, complete with catastrophic overcrowding, volcanoes of vomit, mountains of dirt, and if you were very lucky, the occasional Stuka.
In the past 15 years, the public service has withdrawn from most areas of economic activity, to be replaced by the bustle and efficiency of private enterprise. But wherever we see the hand of government agencies still, we see again the same arbitrary authority and arrogant stupidity which once governed so many areas of Irish life, and which over a decade ago gave us the glories of the Red Cow roundabout. Nowhere are these qualities embodied more than in the works and pomps of the National Roads Authority.
I have in this space frequently protested - and in vain - about the sign at the fork entering the orbital M50 outside Dublin, which offers drivers the choices of "North" or "South", without saying what destinations lie in either direction. The presumption is, of course, that drivers are confident about what lies where. But, of course, drivers - whether Irish or foreign - often know virtually nothing about what compass direction they need to take; that's why we need proper signs which presume ignorance. And now the NRA, by its own despicable admission, accepts that it has not bothered to give us such direction for off-motorway petrol stations. Moreover, drivers passing Kill could not possibly know it is the last petrol station for 80 miles.
Look. This is not trivial stuff. It is morally wrong to create hundreds of miles of motorway without 24-hour rest-stops. Tired drivers kill. It is morally wrong to compel drivers to leave the broad highway of modern roads to go sleuthing around tiny boreens looking for good old Seamie with his welcoming smile, his Sweet Afton and his hand-cranked petrol pump.
And it is morally wrong for the NRA to create conditions in which women drivers can be marooned without petrol in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere, for reasons that are explicable only within the batty intellectual abstractions of NRA ideologues.