OPINION/Kevin Myers: Entralling Episode 28 of the Divina Commedia, M50, named after an Irish road, a single journey along which inspired a demented Dante into writing: Abandon Hope, All You Who Enter Here.
Like Dante, I too have written many times - to equally little effect - about the signs on an approach road to the new extension to the M50 which simply declares you have two options: north one way, south the other. Since almost nobody without satellite navigation equipment in their heads could possibly be expected to know whether the place they want to go to is actually north or south of that particular junction, the information is perfectly meaningless.
No matter. Putting up meaningless signs seems to be one of the prime objectives of the National Roads Authority, which is to the science of semiotics what Jackie Healy-Rae is to Shakespearian soliloquies.
Confusing motorists
Still, it was good the other day to see my old friend the north-south option still there, confusing motorists as always. Nothing brings so much joy to the happy faces of that sterling bunch of anarchic individualists, the National Guild of Sign Writers & Chaos Causers, as seeing bunches of baffled motorists scratching their heads at yet another misleading example of their art. Moreover, signwriters double their points if they mislead a motorist into the wrong slip-road and then tell him that's he's going in the opposite direction to the one he wants to go in, tempting him to reverse back up the slope.
Do you know that once you leave Tallaght on the M50, heading south-west, you will never once see a sign for Dun Laoghaire, though that is the prime destination at the other end of the motorway, and the home of Ireland's most important ferry-port? But after a while you do see an ideogram of a ship, the standard European sign for a ferry, urging you onwards. That seems straightforward - though the fact that the placename next to the ferry-sign is "Dundrum" raises the possibility that things might not be that simple.
Mrs Myers, she didn't raise any sailors, but even the most landlubberly of us would know that global warming would have to get pretty bad before Dundrum could be a port. We'd all be standing on each others' shoulders on the few remaining habitable bits of land if Dundrum did become our gateway to the world. I know this, of course, and so do most Irish people; but an awful lot of foreigners couldn't be expected to know it. And confusing foreigners is surely one of a signwriter's primary purposes in life, no?
Whimsical abandon
And not just foreigners. For an awful of Irish people would assume - as I assumed - that a sign that pointed to a ferry and Dundrum would be directing us towards a junction where the traffic streams for the two destinations separate. Now, knowing what I do about the National Roads Authority, and the gay and whimsical abandon with which it treats road-signs, why on earth should I believe that some sort of coherent system might be at work here?
Why? Because though Mrs Myers might not have produced any jack-tars, she did produce one trusting, gibbering imbecile, whose name may be found at the end of this column. And so, despite the torrid relationship between me and the National Roads Authority - one which has seen me marooned up cow-tracks, surrounded by inquisitive Friesians spouting dung at midnight, to which fate I have been carefully led by NRA signposts - I dutifully followed the signs for "Ferry", on the assumption that sooner or later they would lead me to Dun Laoghaire.
They led me to Dundrum, as they had promised (but no doubt, if I'd wanted to go there, hidden NRA employees, who can divine from a driver's baffled eyes as he gazes in panic up at the signs where he wants to go to, accordingly switch signs around in order to send him elsewhere). And just after Dundrum, there was, finally a ferry-port sign with a name on it: however, it was not for Dun Laoghaire, but for Dublin City Port. So it was Dublin City Port which was being signposted on the M50, just outside Dun Laoghaire, its intention presumably being to lure people away from the port of Dun Laoghaire where they actually wanted to go, to Dublin where they didn't.
This, now, is the true triumph of the signmaker's genius; for down in Dublin docklands, right this very minute, you can probably find despairing Germans fingering upside-down maps and craning out of car windows, trying to find a signpost which will lead them to Dun Laoghaire.
Forget it
Listen, Germans, Italians, French, Britons: forget it. There are no signposts that will faithfully lead you from Dublin city centre to Dun Laoghaire, though there are lots which will ultimately lead you back to where you now are, but via Tallaght, Athlone, Dundalk and, vell vock me, Heidi, it's zat verdammt Tallaght again. Ve here zis morning vere.
Jah, Hans, und yesterday unt ze day before.
My advice is this. See that return ticket you have via Dun Laoghaire? Throw it away, in the street, just like the natives do, and then buy a one-way ferry-ticket out of Dublin port, for oh, wherever: Hungary, the Falklands, Dogger Bank, it really doesn't matter. Wherever you end up, you won't find a more inept and pathetic signposting authority than the one you've just left behind. And as you finally wave farewell to Ireland's receding coastline, spare a thought for us. We, poor bastards, have to live with them. Worse, we actually pay them.