Emissions/Kilian Doyle: This is just too easy. The Minister for Transport, while being driven home from Dublin Airport, spots a few strange-coloured road signs that weren't there when he left, can't work out what they're supposed to mean, realises he wasn't consulted in the first place, kicks up a stink and €200,000 of taxpayers' money goes down the tubes. Not even I could have made that one up.
Ah, but sure 'tis all in the name of progress, isn't it? Poor auld Dublin City Council officials - they use a bit of initiative (and a hefty chunk of tax-payers' dosh), only to get stamped on by the grumpy honcho in the new job.
He gives them a week to come up with the goods - or, by Jaysus, they'll feel the back of his ministerial hand. The signs were, Mr Brennan insisted, "too confusing and complex", and you'd have to be "a maths student" to understand them. Would that be primary or PhD level, minister? Surely you were a maths student once yerself - or is there something we should know, considering you are presumably in charge of a massive budget?
At least the council managed to whack up a tenth of the signs before being ordered to stop. Shame that, for therein lies their biggest mistake. Did they not see the folly in introducing a whole new traffic system involving the use of complicated new signposts before putting the bloody things up! And who has to run round and take the errant 10 per cent down again?
Council members claimed the Minister got sulky and has "his nose out of joint" over the system because they thought of it first, while the Lord Mayor wondered if he had nothing better to do than order them around.
Well, first off, the claim of Mr Brennan feeling usurped by the council implies he approves of its work, which he obviously doesn't, or I'd probably be writing about how annoying old women driving Morris Minors are.
As for you, Mr Lord Mayor - you're deluded if you think that canny Galwegian is going to sit idly by and let you lot steal his thunder. He's just landed himself a plum job with a brand-new mandate to sort out the catastrophe his predecessor left us with before her ignominious departure to the Senate. Okay, so he approves in principle of the new system, but it's the modus operandi that grates with him.
Any chance he gets, from dubbing the LUAS bridge in Dundrum the "Golden Gate" of Ireland (Calm down - it's a flyover for trams, not a globally recognised cultural icon!) to throwing a wobbler on this issue, he's going to be justifying his worthiness to He Who Shall Be Obeyed. My advice would be tug the forelock, lick the wounds and have another lash at it.
But now we're told the supposedly new-look signs will be - wait for it - almost exactly the same. Except they won't be orange. Or purple. They'll still have the hieroglyphics and remain name-free, so we'll all just have to study the one of 500,000 maps that have been sent out and learn the junction numbers off by heart. All 70 of them.
The council claims the plan has led to half as many cars on O'Connell Street in the mornings. They're all stuck on Dorset Street backed up as far as the Taoiseach's turf in Drumcondra instead. Ah, now it's all beginning to make sense . . .