The Last Straw Frank McNallyTook the LUAS to work this week for the first time, and God it felt good. Collecting my ticket from a polite, speaking machine at a sleek Heuston Plaza, I thought I'd accidentally stepped into one of those computer-generated images of the future that you see in property supplements.
The illusion continued as we glided through the north inner city in a glass tube, making electronic "ding-ding" noises at humans who crossed our path.
It was a shock to hear the stop announcements translated into Irish: you're expecting French or German instead. But the red line's cool, post-modern place names - "Hospital", "Fatima", "Museum" - sound like the track-list from a Kraftwerk album. Only the line's intensely colourful zone 3, which includes a Red Cow and a Black Horse, and continues through the sparsely inhabited Blue Bell before crossing Goldenbridge, hints at Ireland's pastoral tradition.
The driver's horn is also bilingual. When the European-style "ding-ding" doesn't clear the track ahead, there's a manually-operated "Beep!" (Irish for "get out of the way!") But not even this could break the spell as we slid smoothly across O'Connell Street - its abstract spire glinting in the sunshine like a futurist signalling system - into lower Abbey Street, where I alighted. Normally I'd just get off, but I was in a strange mood by then.
You could lose the run of yourself with all this modernisation. Luckily, that day, I was on my way into the Dáil, where time is frozen in 1953. In the entrance lobby, the Civil War has only recently ended, and figures from the opposing sides stare at each other across your head (which you're inclined to keep down, in case shooting breaks out again).
Portraits of famous dead men line the corridors of power - and the other corridors as well - while busts of famous dead men circle the Dáil chamber itself. The sculptors have rendered some of them Roman-style, to remove all traces of the stigma that attaches in these parts to the living.
The press gallery is even more sobering. Reporters occupy a balcony above the Ceann Comhairle - like a church choir (albeit one that's not allowed to make noise). On the bench before us, brass plaques allocate the positions of respective newspapers, including "Cork Examiner", "Irish Press", and "Freeman's Journal". OK, I made up the last one. But the other titles remain, oblivious to both expensive rebranding campaigns and the passage of time.
My equilibrium restored, I went home again on the LUAS that night feeling delicately balanced somewhere between tradition and modernity. Which, as last week's column argued, is also the place occupied by the State's road-sign system, or at least the bits of it that aren't in Irish pubs abroad. I suggested then that our signage reflects aspects of the Irish personality - in particular the way neighbouring signs disagree with each other (often over nothing). And concerned reader Michael MacNamara has offered further evidence for this view.
A veteran local authority engineer who did his bit to reform the system before succumbing to despair, Michael now collects photographs of junctions that boast both "Yield" and "Stop" signs, side by side. Sure enough, he attaches an example, where the two signs are having a stand-up row (actually, the "Stop" sign is painted on the road) while embarrassed motorists, unsure how to react, wait for them to reach a compromise.
His collection extends to pictures of signs with Irish translations of names that were already Irish: including one in Gort, Co Galway, where a sign pointing to the police station features the word "Garda", helpfully translated into "Gardaí". If only the Minister for Justice could increase the numbers on the beat as easily.
Meanwhile, another correspondent, Sylvie Rucquat, writes to ask what has happened to Dublin's inner and outer orbital ring route signs. Readers will recall that the original versions were withdrawn because they were too confusing, even by the standards of existing signs, and then reintroduced in simplified form. But Ms Rucquat suggests the new ones were taken down mysteriously a few months ago and are only now being put back: "Surely I can't be the only person to have noticed this?"
Well, Sylvie, I've asked a number of people, including Dublin City Council, and you do seem to be the only person who's noticed. As you correctly suggest, however, nobody consults these signs, so if they did disappear overnight, it could be a while before anyone copped it. But the signs in my part of the city are still there (and I still don't understand them). I can only suggest that the ones missing from your neighbourhood are now in pubs in New York.