Could there be an Irish Captain Gatso on the prowl? For those of you who've never heard of Captain Gatso: it's the nom de guerre of a self-styled superhero, who is wont to sport pantyhose and a Tony Blair mask during interviews, writes Kilian Doyle.
Why is he of interest? He's the head of Motorists Against Detection (MAD), a loosely-affiliated bunch of saboteurs who've taken it upon themselves to systematically vandalise Britain's 5,000 speed cameras.
This collection of gobdaws and loodramawns fancy themselves as some modern-day Robin Hood and his Merry Men. (How the originals could have been merry living in a forest and wearing tights is beyond me. But then again . . .) MAD claims its mandate comes from frustrated motorists and regards the cameras not as live-saving bits of equipment integral in a cohesive national road safety policy, but as money-making machines. So, by incinerating, decapitating, shooting, dynamiting, angle-grinding and dragging away every camera it can, MAD feels it is saving British motorists from unfair taxation.
This MAD lot, like another shower blighting this island with their fondness for similar procedures on people's limbs, don't regard their activities as crimes. They're Freedom Fighters, you see. So that makes it all right.
It's true that speed cameras are everywhere in Britain and the Treasury's coffers are expanded by at least £20 million in fines from the 1.5 million speeders caught by the cameras each year. But then again, it's also true that Britain has the lowest number of road fatalities per head in the EU. Go figure.
And now, like all of the most obnoxious things in British culture, like 30-strong hen parties, alcopops and Robbie Williams, MAD tactics appear to have crossed the Irish Sea.
A camera on the M1 has been "pulled from the ground" according to a Garda spokeswoman, while another on the northbound lane of the N3 outside Navan has been set on fire. I'm no forensic scientist, but the suspicion these were deliberate, malicious acts looks fairly conclusive. The cameras, as far as I know, aren't equipped with self-destruct mechanisms.
(I'm a bit sceptical about the possible motivation of the truck driver who flattened a camera on the R132 near Drogheda and kept going - seems a pretty extreme and risky way of exacting vengeance on an inanimate object. It seems entirely plausible that he or she just whacked into it by accident and then legged it. So I'll not be putting that down to MAD-clones.)
I don't want to start scaremongering, or worse still, encouraging these cretins. Three destroyed cameras in Britain would barely register a blip in the overall scheme of things. But here, where our total investment in saving lives through the proven method of using speed cameras is - wait for it - 20 camera boxes on poles, it's a bit of a concern.
It gets worse. Of those 20 cameras boxes, only three at a time are ever occupied by an actual camera. They rotate them, you see. (At around €60,000 a go, sure how could a poor downtrodden nation like this be expected to have more than three? The consultant's fees alone in deciding where to put them would have us all living in hedges and eating slugs again, like the bad old days . . .)
While statistically unlikely, all this means there could actually be no operational speed cameras in the State at all. By some stroke of fluke, the three boxes containing our only three cameras could be the very three that have been destroyed.
So, there may not be anyone watching you as you tear along blindly disregarding the speed limit. Or, then again, there may be. The Gardai ain't tellin'.
Now, tell me this - do you feel lucky, punks?
A final word to you, Paddy O'Gatso, if you are indeed out there. You are not a Freedom Fighter. You are a dangerous, self-absorbed, bitter little tool. Get a life.