Emissions/Kilian Doyle: Several thousand of you lovely people may be in for a nasty shock in the next few months if the Garda ever get it together and send out your speeding tickets, not one of which has troubled a postman since penalty points were introduced last October.
Several of you could actually be banned from driving and not even know it. (Not that you'll get any sympathy from me, mind. If I could, I'd slip a photo of myself, pointing and sneering, into every letter. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.)
Last week's suspiciously-timed leak of an internal Garda report shows the boys and girls in blue are struggling to keep pace with the whole penalty points system. Quelle surprise!
Among the predictable complaints of underfunding and overstretching, it notes that 10,000 photos of speeding cars await processing. (Surely when you've taken away ministerial cars, there can't be more than a few hundred?)
The situation is so farcical that people are being paid taxpayers' money to sit and draw lines with rulers in penalty points books because nobody thought of checking they were up to the job before they were printed. This non-person was presumably also entrusted with ensuring the Garda crest was the right way up on self-same notebooks.
A certain party from the Garda Representative Association said some of its members were "embarrassed" at the situation, which left them standing by the side of the road, filling out these forms by hand. (At the time, I screamed: "Why, can they not operate a pencil?" at the TV, but of course, I'd never repeat such a slander in public.)
This botch-up is hardly a surprise to anyone. The snail-like progress of the Garda Síochána at pulling its dinosaur butt into the present makes the Catholic Church's hierarchy look like a bunch of MTV-generation techno-teens.
Admittedly it's not all the Garda's fault. Unbelievably, they've been waiting over four years for a computer system to link the courts, the Garda and the Department of the Environment.
I have one, very simple, question: Why? A few techies in our office would sort out a whole integrated system in the time it takes the average garda to work out how his radio works. If those responsible were working in the private sector, they'd all be on the dole years ago.
Frankly, the whole thing smells of sabotage to me. Big cheeses in the Phoenix Park were whinging last year that the points system would never work, they didn't have the manpower or the technology and they were being pushed around by a big meanie with a big office on Kildare Street.
As for the lower reaches of the force, the less said the better. I wouldn't dare risk it - I haven't broken any laws for years, but that's no guarantee that by this time next year I won't be sitting in Mountjoy, fervently fighting off my cellmate, Lenny the Love Muscle.
In the end this is all about money - Garda Malachy O'Breathalyser wants more and he's digging in his heels. And the Government doesn't want to spend any on providing the resources to ensure penalty points don't get abandoned as another great idea rendered unworkable by intransigence and greed.
It's a cynical viewpoint, I agree. But just because I'm bitter and twisted doesn't mean I'm not right. The simple fact is that we've had 58 fewer funerals in the past four months than in the equivalent period before points were introduced. Without a solution, that figure will quickly be reversed and the funerals will begin again.