Alas! I have been unable to follow fully the exotic tale of Tom Roche and his sister Eleanor and their legal dispute over their humble little family home in Blackrock, which went for €47 million last month, writes Kevin Myers.
The Roche family sat on top of the Cement Roadstone empire, which is a pleasant enough peak from which to view the world - but not nearly as pleasant as from the West-Link toll bridge, surely one of the most bizarre state-protected monopolies in all of Europe. The only way across the Liffey valley outside Dublin's city centre is via the West-Link, along the State-owned M50. But instead of the State owning the entire length of the M50, it franchised out the few yards of the bridge to the Roche family.
Building bridges is not difficult for most societies. The Nile - a somewhat mightier watercourse than the Liffey - was first bridged in 2650 BC. The Romans built the 87-mile long aquaduct of Carthage from the springs of Zaghouan nearly 1,900 years ago. The Lake Pontchartain causeway in Louisiana is 24 miles long. Closer to home, the Humberside suspension bridge is nearly a mile long.
So, though the Liffey Valley is a moderate hurley-puck across its width, this State decided it was simply unable to manage to bridge it. It therefore contracted the construction and the maintenance of the bridge, and the resulting tolls, to the ill-named National Toll Roads. The state then built the motorways linking the bridge to the rest of the world.
This is pontifical idiocy. For without the State building the M50 to the bridge, the latter is useless; yet the State surrendered control of about a hundred yards of the orbital system around the capital to a private company, from which the latter makes vast fortunes. It did this not once, but twice - most recently when NTR was allowed to build a second bridge across the Liffey.
The toll-booths are an artificial and privatised bottleneck which cause immense and economically ruinous disruption to traffic at a key point in our national motorway grid - but for the Roche family they are an assurance of a vast Niagara of gold.
The economist David McWilliams, writing in the Sunday Business Post last weekend (and from whose article I am plagiarising shamelessly), reports that it might cost the State €300 million to buy the Roches' slab of concrete over the Liffey.
In other words, the State effectively owned a monopoly, which it surrendered to a company, which it can now buy back only at huge expense. Meanwhile, one single company controls this choke-point in the Irish economy. Can anyone explain how such nonsense occurs? And is anyone in public office answerable for such folly? The answer to these questions is: no. The National Roads Authority superintends roads policy in this State. When TDs tried to discover how the NRA works, they failed. They found the NRA - No Reason Anywhere - unhelpful and arrogant. The NRA is apparently answerable to no one. It lives in a world of its own, its policies conjured out of the very thin air of NRA cerebral activity.
Mankind discovered about 70 years ago that median crash-barriers on motorways were essential to prevent horrific head-on crashes. Every country has learnt from that primary experience. Except us. Our NRA State agency decided to build motorways on which vehicles can cross over the central reservation - inevitably causing collisions with on-coming streams, with the catastrophic results that are entirely predictable to all but the geniuses in the NRA.
There's no point in asking the NRA State agency anything, because you won't get an answer. I asked years ago why the signpost on the entry to the orbital M50 merely pointed "north" and "south" without explaining to motorists what destinations lay north and south, and haven't got an answer yet. The utterly useless sign is still there.
The motorway system linking Munster with Leinster and Ulster has been built without restaurants, petrol stations or toilets. Those that exist pre-date the implementation of the NRA's plans. Thus - and I have written about this before many, many times - when travelling on the N7 northwards, the petrol station just before Kill in Co Kildare is the last you will encounter before you reach the Border nearly 100 miles away.
The NRA's policy was outlined in reply to an indignant letter to Bord Fáilte from an English visitor, which has been passed on to me. That reply said it was actual policy not to provide any facilities on the new road network because it would require the NRA to enter into agreements with third party developers - though this is precisely what it has done with National Toll Roads. Lay-bys were being built where motorists could rest, said the letter, but very deliberately, without toilets or any other facilities.
Well, what about private enterprise operations near the motorways? How might strangers know about them? The NRA letter was delightfully frank about this too. "It is not [ my italics] the policy of the National Roads Authority to provide signage for individual premises providing services or facilities."
Now how can such blithering cretinism be construed as "policy"? Why are not heads rolling by the dozen around those two colossal monuments to brainless NRA ineptitude, the Red Cow Roundabout and the West Link toll booths? And why does Dáil Éireann continue to tolerate this monstrous outrage?