"You shouldn't be looking out the car window for those plovers when you're driving along these roads," said a neighbour who had been reading here. "Didn't you see in The Meath Chronicle that people are speeding like mad. Get yourself killed." And sure enough there is a headline "Two Out of Five Truckers Continue to Speed", and the first paragraph of the story has it that one in five car drivers also regularly breaks the speed limit. That is from the annual report of the National Roads Authority, which also tells us how the Louth-Meath region is pioneering a speed camera project to try to tackle the problem. Twenty are now almost ready. Speeds varied when a survey was taken with a colossal figure for Julianstown - for while an average of 16,550 vehicles were driving through it last October, 74 per cent of cars and 72 per cent of the 1,600 trucks using the road, were found to be breaking the 30 mile limit. Just one per cent of the truckers, however exceeded the 50 mph upper limit. Kells, Tara and Delvin had lower speeding limits.
That's how the Gardai look at it, but often it's not so much the speed of lorries or other cars that the sensible driver is concerned with. It is, for example, the unwillingness or inability of other vehicles to keep a safe and comfortable distance from your own car. It is no consolation to know that the huge van or truck which sticks two yards behind you, with the driver seated high over your car is within the speed limit. If someone wasn't paying attention and suddenly took his foot off the accelerator, the huge beast would be over him and little would remain of car or passengers. Car drivers themselves run risks, for themselves and others, when they nip into the carefully safe space you have left between you and the one in front; sometimes even a second idiot follows him - it's almost always a him.
But, of course, the greatest change in any driver's lifetime has been in the size of the monsters that modern commerce puts onto our roads, some of them double-jointed and painfully difficult in narrow streets of small towns. Then we have the one-hand-to-the-mobile driver. Scores of them. And how good are you and I on the roads ourselves? Well, no looking and craning around as you drive to spot the flocks of plovers, or the rooks falling about as they build their nests.