It is not widely known that when our splendid National Roads Authority decides to build a motorway, it advertises for road engineers in The Port Moresby Headhunters' And Cannibals' Argus. With good reason, for this ensures that entirely fresh thinking, unsullied by any preconceived notions of road engineering, is available.
You see, there are no roads in the particular area where the Argus has its widest circulation. Nor is there traffic of any kind. Road engineers recruited from the jungles of New Guinea have a pretty shrewd idea how to remove a head in a single swipe - left to right with a slight downward angle to the blade is the usual preferred option - and they can in an instant identify the juiciest part of a Jesuit missionary; but they haven't a clue how to run build a road between two large conurbations so that the traffic may pass between them with minimum delay.
Fresh minds
In other words, they have fresh minds; and the National Roads Authority then sends them to the Kim Il Sung School of Traffic Management, on the big roundabout outside Pyongyang. There they are taught according to North Korean Communist precepts of road-building and, if possible, cured of their addiction to beheading people and turning Jesuitical rib-cages into a tasty if bony repast; though, strictly speaking, this is not necessary. Respect for human life is rather low on the order of priorities in Irish traffic management.
Thus the graduates, their minds finely tuned to the ideological requirements of their new employer, are unleashed on the business of traffic management in Ireland. There are, however, certain basic rules which they will have mastered at Kim Il Sung College. One is that no road is really quite a road unless it is punctuated by huge roundabouts, whose primary function is to interrupt traffic flow. Roundabouts are rare in most European countries, and as extinct as pterodactyls in some, but in Ireland they have been refined into an art-form; for Ireland is unique in combining roundabouts with traffic lights. Of course, old-fashioned purists will say that these are mutually contradictory forms of traffic management, that roundabouts are about controlling traffic flow by spontaneous individual initiative, while traffic lights work by the opposite principle of inflexible submission to legal command. But what do such people know? They probably cling to reactionary, outdated notions that supersonic aircraft should not be made from chalk or that submarines should not be constructed from blotting paper. Irish roundabouts are the envy of the world. Traffic experts from the four corners of the globe come to stand and marvel at this great Irish contribution to traffic management.
Same questions
And they ask the same cretinous questions, such as: Why are the traffic lights programmed so that only four vehicles at a time get a green light? And why is it possible to move only 15 feet before you encounter a traffic jam created by the next traffic light, which is actually only 20 feet from the traffic light it has just taken you 40 minutes to get through? And why are lights synchronised so that all drivers must inevitably move from red to red? And instead of roundabouts, why are there are not converging lanes at traffic junctions to improve traffic flow and facilitate merging and separation of different streams of vehicles? And why is it necessary to mix up all vehicles coming from four different directions, in a single insane traffic system called a roundabout? And why. . .
Enough of these stupid, stupid questions, which can only be asked by imbeciles who have not benefited from traffic management at Kim Il Sung College. There are indeed so many other techniques one learns there; such as unsignposting. Kim Il Sung teaches that clear, consistent signposting interferes with initiative, and prevents one getting to know the locals. Kim Il Sung teaches that signposts should be mutually contradictory, lest there be an invasion by imperialist forces, and their tanks discover the quick route to the beloved leader's holiday home. Kim Il Sung teaches that even in the simplest journey, one has to stop and ask. Try getting to Dun Laoghaire from Dublin Port without asking a native: you'll be in Murmansk first.
When one sees the clear signposting abroad, when one discovers that foreigners give their motorists clear warning of what lane they should be, miles before their turning, one sees capitalism at its most corrupt. Happily, in Ireland we have avoided that highway jobbery. We have constructed a network of roads that is a triumph of headhunter's improvisation, refined and honed at the Kim Il Sung College of Traffic Management, on the big roundabout there.
Measurement systems
Unsignposting stands as merely one of the triumphs of Irish roads. There are many others, such as the unique experiment in employing two distinct measurement systems, not merely on old roads, but on the few furlongs of recently completed motorway, where miles and kilometres co-exist in amiable contradiction. What matter if foreigners get confused, or risk being killed in their confusion? The last thing roads management in Ireland is predicated on is the preservation of human life. Dear me, no; how old fashioned can you get?
Then we hear that some countries actually make people pass tests before they may drive unaccompanied. Lord, how we laugh at such a notion. How conservative and unimaginative can you be, insisting that drivers actually learn how to drive? We, thank God, order these things better in Ireland. And who will die this weekend because we don't?