Some TDs are opposing Noel Dempsey's plans for radical electoral reform. Now only political troglodytes would wish to retain multi-seat constituencies. They are to honest politics what algae is to fresh water, so I would normally wish Noel Godspeed in his mission to rid us of this electoral pollutant which causes a bloom of fixes, favours and glad-handing. However, I have a question. Why does the busiest Minister in the worst-run department in the entire Government, the Department of the Environment, also have to re-engineer our political life?
Sistine Chapel
It was enough for Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling - nobody said he should install the plumbing, erect the guttering and referee the football match between artisans and apprentices. Though Margaret Thatcher probably yearned to lead a bayonet charge against the Argentinians, nostrils flaring and eyes flashing like disco strobe-lights, she stayed in London issuing commands. Even Michael Collins, easily the most multi-talented man in Irish political life at the time, did not personally go round bumping people off.
I do not think Noel Dempsey is Michael Collins; indeed I do not. I have a far higher opinion of him than that. He doesn't wrestle people to the ground, biting their ears; doesn't arrange for men to be murdered; and doesn't cheat at cards. Give me Noel Dempsey every day. But that aside, why on earth is he trying to take on two almost impossible tasks simultaneously? And if he is capable of bringing order to the DoE as well as achieving electoral reform, why isn't he running Microsoft?
I have written many times before about the DoE's preposterous and dangerous double-measurement system on our roads. It is hardly a bizarre and illogical eccentricity of mine to call for a single unit of measurement. The Israelis do not measure distances in cubits and speeds in Roman miles; the British do not measure the length of their roads in perches and their progress in knots; so why do we continue to construct new roads which signpost distances in metric units and speeds in British imperial units?
Our speed limits seem to have been the handiwork of a graduate of the North Korean School of Traffic Management. Right across the country, in the tiniest lanes and boreens, the general speed limit of 60 m.p.h. applies - though if you tried anything like that in my part of Kildare you'd soon find yourself upside down in a field. Our Department of the Environment has concluded that on thousands of roads across the country it is legal to drive at unsafe speeds at which Eddie Irvine might just avoid an accident, but not the rest of us.
But then we come to the DoE's great unrivalled masterpiece, the very Cistine Chapel of its endeavours, the Naas dual-carriageway.
Speed limits
I know it well. Where it has four lanes and runs unbroken for mile upon mile, its speed limit is 50 m.p.h. Then, for no apparent reason, it becomes 60 m.p.h., the general speed limit. And then the highway widens into a broad and generous six lanes, at which point the speed limit is suddenly reduced to 40 m.p.h.
Now not even the North Koreans at their most homicidally cretinous would insist that when a road is of motorway proportions, the widest in the State, the speed limit should be one third lower than it is in a country lane. This is more like road safety according to the arbitrary ideological musings of Pol Pot, or the Idi Amin Highway Code. It would, of course, be not only stupid but potentially lethal too if motorists paid any attention to these speed limits. They don't; and if one set of speed limits is rightly held in contempt, what is to prevent that contempt from spreading to where limits are sensible?
There is an abiding principle to safe traffic flow: consistency. Creating different speed-zones, causing vehicles to slow and then accelerate, according to purely arbitrary and logically incomprehensible rules, violates that principle. It is extremely dangerous - though whether or not the DoE is aware of this is another question. That would probably require examination of motorway networks in other countries, whereas our roads seem to have been built as if we had invented the motorway, and now we're waiting for the Germans to come and take lessons from us.
Filter sign
How else was it possible for DoE engineers to put a left-filter-only sign on the left lane on the Naas dual carriageway, followed 100 yards later by a sign that the left-turn is optional?
This is not a frivolous matter. The first sign could well cause cars heading southwards to change lanes hurriedly, with potentially lethal consequences.
How else was it possible that the Blanchardstown/Galway Road connection onto the north-moving lane of the M50 was built, not as a converging slip-road, but as a junction from which it is impossible to leave at peak hours when traffic on the M 50 is busy, so causing colossal traffic congestion throughout the neighbouring road network? The solution, on this, the newest motorway in the State, is to have gardai on point duty directing traffic as they used to do on O'Connell Street in the 1950s.
But it's all right, Noel: I don't expect you to do anything about it. You run the DoE. Dunces Only Employed.