Dr Edward Harty takes me (mildly) to task for not - in a recent Irishman's Diary - addressing the "downside" of the quaint but dangerously out-of-date location-finding system in Ireland. In truth I am sick, sore and tired of writing about roads, road-signs and road accidents in Ireland, and if I erupt in an occasional shriek of whimsy, it is merely the whimsy of despair.
We are rightly becoming extremely angry about the Hepatitis C scandal, with all its many layers. It has been called the biggest scandal in the history of the State, and indeed I have so called it: it is clear, defined, and almost discrete - though just how discrete is becoming more and more uncertain each day.
But its constituency is ultimately limited, and represents a cogent group of young mothers who were contaminated by the State - maybe a thousand in all, many of whom will have cured themselves. There has been one death so far, and a death too many.
Virtually no outcry
But we get a death too many on our roads almost every day, and there is virtually no outcry - in part because the victims do not belong to a cogent group, and in part because our political and social culture accepts such deaths.
So the public figures who nationally and regionally are responsible for our roads policy do not stand aloof from the main body of our population; in their slovenly incompetence, in their affable stupidity, in their half-witted policy-making, they truly represent the wishes of the broad mass of people. Very seldom do I congratulate public officials for being in tune with the popular mood, but in the matter of roads, I must.
At the highest level there is a structural and institutional failure to create a coherent and consistent policy on our roads, even on the simple matter of measuring distance. Visitors to Ireland leaving Dublin Airport see signs informing them that the general maximum speed limit in Ireland is 100 kilometres an hour, suggesting that our speed limits are expressed in such terms: seek on, visitor, and in vain, for that is just about the last such sign you will see in Ireland. Henceforward, our speed signs are in miles per hour.
As indeed are the speedometers in our cars. Our odometers, which measure distance travelled, are also in miles. But our distance-signposts are not in miles but in kilometres. We have a single-system for distance-measurement in our cars, but even our new motorways embrace the twin creeds of imperial and metric, and it would be perfectly possible for a foreigner to arrive in Ireland ferry and never realise that the bedlam of numbers which will confront him as he pauses at junctions and road-signs and speed-signs belong to two distinct systems of measurement.
No blame, no shame
Do people die of this? Not many, probably. But the really important thing is that they are not seen to die because of it. No blame, no shame. The engineers responsible for this confusion are never called to public account; and maybe properly. They do what the politicians demand, and the politicians divine the public mood on such matters. We have kilometres/miles road signs: sure isn't that part of our charm? In a word, no.
Equally, I dare say not many people die in a year or a decade because our local authorities are too bone-idle or too contemptuous of the road-user who is paying their wages to complete a single set of direction-signs between two places without abandoning the road-user at a multi-exit roundabout without a single signpost to help out. No matter. I have written about the Dublin-Dalkey road which has such a roundabout till I am blue in the face. The last time I saw it, it was still not properly signposted. Nor will it be. Who cares? Not South Dublin County Council, apparently.
The simple direction-signs in North County Dublin, aka Fingal, are no better. In fact, they are appalling. Yet how is it possible - for it cannot within EU law be legal - for Fingal to have erected at least 20 signs for its own golf-driving range in Elm Green?
Meanwhile it has permitted competing golf ranges such as at Tyrrelstown to erect only the odd sign or two, with a huge planning permission fee for each one to be paid to - well, of course - Fingal County council.
Moral obligations
How it is possible? Because the Irish people have permitted national and local governments to forget their binding moral and legal obligations. Locally, road-signs are ignored while little hobbies like golf-driving ranges are indulged. Nationally, road-deaths cause merely seasonal fits of anguish: laws are not enforced and rigorous sentences are not imposed.
So the road-signs of Ireland - for which, unlike our economy, we are totally responsible - tell us more about this spurious, ridiculous confection called the Celtic Tiger than all the economic statistics coming from the ESRI. They reveal a cultural and moral infantilism in public affairs, of which the Hepatitis C scandal is merely another - but, I fear, a lesser - symptom. For it is not hard to get these things right, once you are grown-up enough to insist on it. Insisting is the first razor, the first tampon. Time to grow up, time to insist.