It might be ignorance which speaks: but it is often hard to escape the conclusion that we are the worst-governed country in the EU. Maybe the Italians would disagree, that the blue riband for corruption goes to them. From my Greek friends, I can hear an Athenian clamour insisting that the Papandreou years exceeded by the heat of a dozen suns the dishonesty of Irish political life. No doubt they're right, despite the festival of corruption and abject cowardice which struts and frets upon the stage of our tribunals, not by the hour, but by the year.
But I'm not talking about corruption. I'm talking about pure bad government, which in all honesty creates and inflicts policy counter-productive to the common weal of the governed. This is not a matter of party politics: just about the only groups not to have been in government in the last 20 years are Sinn Fein and the West Clare Railway Preservation Society.
Pondering committee
The Oireachtas Committee of Law Reform, Wimmin's Equal Access to Orgasms, Pub Licensing Hours & Whatever Idiocy We Can Fill That Lump of Lard We Call Our Minds With sat for about five years pondering about when we - the citizens which elected it - should be allowed to buy alcohol. These strutting simpletons finally decided (oh to have sampled the cerebral delights of their conversations for the merest hour!) that it would be Perfectly Awful for Ireland if we were able to buy wine at 2.05 on a Sunday afternoon or a pint in a pub at 11.45 p.m., and so they recommended such villainies be outlawed, with transgressors to be summarily executed (or something on those lines). The Minister, John O'Donoghue, didn't pay much attention to their report, being determined to make a horse's arse of a law of his very own. The outcome was a marginal improvement on what the Oireachtas Committee had proposed; but so indeed would have been the final thoughts of a barrel full of baboons going over a waterfall. This brings us back to bad government - not that it is corrupt. Truly bad government seldom is, nor even ineffective. The essence of bad governance is not its failure to achieve its ends, but that the ends themselves are both bad and, worse still, are achieved. Bad governance at its purest is evident in the formulation of implementation of - yes, I'm back on my hobby-horse - our roads policy, so detailed in its imbecility, so exhaustively comprehensive in its homicidal idiocy, that the consequences resemble Moloch's doodlings.
Take, for example, one government levy, the vehicle registration tax and how it is implemented on a vehicle like a Toyota four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser. It arrives in this country with seats front and back and passenger windows front and back as well. Once here, Land Cruisers are deliberately made more dangerous, under the vigilant supervision of inspectors from Excise.
Windows blocked
An intact Land Cruiser, complete with passenger-seats and windows in the back, attracts a commercial VRT of £12,184. But with its rear passenger windows blocked up and rear passenger seats removed, it attracts a VRT of just £40. Moreover, the commercial vehicle is eligible for VAT deductions - meaning that the relative costs are, passenger Land Cruiser, £45,425, Commercial Land Cruiser, £29, 485: a £16,000 saving.
What does this saving mean? Firstly, a far cheaper vehicle, more available to the young and inexperienced driver, but secondly, it is now a very much more dangerous machine because of its much reduced visibility. With the rear side windows gone, rear lateral visibility is reduced by 100 per cent. By its differential taxes, government policy is bribing drivers to turn expensive vehicles into cheaper, more dangerous ones, with a 70 per cent blindspot behind.
Worse, to ensure that such vehicles can't be made safe again, via the black market, department inspectors actually insist on attending the destruction of windows and seats removed from the Land Cruisers. The Government actually creates and polices a system to make vehicles more dangerous.
Dimwittedness
Enter the Toyota Hilux, a flatback truck with passenger seats behind the driver, ideal for carrying workmen, with their tools on the pickup bed behind. With commercial VRT, it should cost £19,188. But Excise inspectors, in all their spellbinding dimwittedness, have ruled that the extra passenger seats mean that it is a car; its cost, with car VRT, is accordingly £30,325.
Now, if you know a builder who'll pay £11,000 extra in government taxes for a vehicle to transport his workers honestly and within the law, your name is Sven and you're reading this on the Internet in Malmo. Here in Ireland, Sven, builders will do what they've always done when faced with such a choice - cram all their workers illegally in the back of a Hiace, where they are bounced and swirled around like asylum-seeking stowaways in a concrete-mixer.
The lunacy continues. Low commercial VRT depends on a definition of rear area floorspace. So newly imported vehicles just short of the required rear area are reconstructed on their arrival here, with the driver and passenger seats being raised and placed on an extended rear floor, which, though not actually conferring more space, conforms to the inane letter of an inane law. One 4x4 has actually been given a smaller steering wheel to make room for the elevated (and thereby endangered) driver.
Here are standards of cretinism which even the Oireachtas Committee for Law Reform, Orgasms, Wimmin's Equality & Cosmic Stupidity, can only gawp admiringly at, and wonder: What Can We Come Up With Next?