No, no, it is too good to be true, better even than our using two systems of measurement on our highways: our National Roads Authority, those masters of semiotics, has been putting up confusing signs all over the country which give conflicting information about the numbers of people killed on the road. No doubt the NRA thinks that puzzling drivers is a way of making them safer drivers. Interesting theory, gentleman.
The signs bear two sets of figures. One is for the numbers of people killed in road crashes in the four years up to 1999. The new upper figure gives the numbers killed in the four years up to 2000, but without explaining this. The figures therefore appear to contradict one another.
Contradictory figures
"A spokesman said the figures were designed to make motorists think twice about speeding." I see. And this business of putting out two apparently contradictory sets of figures for motorists to make head or tail of comes under the meaning of "design", does it?
No doubt in the odd world of the National Roads Authority it does. This is a world in which a new branch of the M50 can be completed, and signposts erected at the point of entry pointing either north or south, but without saying what places are to the north and what places are to the south.
In other words, you have to know the road, and the location of the places it connects, plus the location of your point of entry on the M50, for that north-south signpost to have any meaning. I didn't, and therefore it didn't, and I found myself going in the wrong direction.
What matter. Only another half my day gone west as I headed south.
But that minor failure of semiotics is nothing whatever compared to the National Road Authority's recent plans for a by-pass at Slane, the tightest and most dangerous bottle-neck in Ireland: namely, no plans at all.
Despite the merry harvest of slaughter at a town which should more properly be called Slay, through which thousands of vehicles a week pass, down two steep hills and over a single-lane bridge, the authority did not plan to by-pass it. The NRA only changed its mind this year after the 11th fatality on the bridge in 11 years.
But is that how policy on our roads is decided? If you can assemble a soccer team of dead bodies at a single point, then something might be done about it; otherwise not? Not that the National Roads Authority must bear the blame for everything.
Speed limits
It was not it which 10 years ago raised the standard speed limit to 60 m.p.h. across the State, often on roads which can't take vehicles moving more than 40 m.p.h., but Minister Michael Smith. Nowadays, he's the star of the Department of Defence, the lad who compromised the security of the Rangers wing by insisting that he be photographed meeting them, with their faces clearly visible. Join the Rangers, the specialist anti-terrorist Army unit, and be photographed, so as the alphabet soup of IRAs know who you are.
It was comparable idiocy which prompted him when he was Minister for the Environment to raise the speed limit, on the moronic principle that a higher speed limit was in accordance with European norms. Firstly, this isn't true, because in most European countries speed limits vary according to the quality of the roads, and secondly they have roads there, not goat-tracks.
And most of all, they haven't got the National Roads Authority, they haven't got two systems of measurement, one in imperial and the other in metric, and they haven't got signs on new roads saying north and south, without indicating what places those roads go to.
We should be grateful to Tim O'Brien, our Regional Development Correspondent, who recently listed the sad, failed initiatives to improve road safety. Mandatary carrying of licence due for 1999, still not in force. Written test? Delayed two years. Computerisation of national driver file? Due 2,000, still not happened. National speed survey? Due last year, now due next, ho ho ho. Breath-test as evidence? Due three years ago, now due whenever, 2002 maybe, but don't hold your breath, ho ho ho again. These are figures which would do credit to Enver Hoxer's Albania, or Pancho Villa's Mexico.
Drink driving statistics
There are around 10,440 detections for drink-driving per year, which averages out at one per county per day. Now you have to be extremely unlucky, or fabulously drunk, to be caught driving under the influence of drink in Ireland. Indeed, you probably need to be sitting on the roof of your car, trying to steer with ropes, and singing "My poor mother drowned in the pool at Lourdes, shot by a bastarding Black and Tan gun," even to be suspected of being under the influence of alcohol.
Actually, you can blame State agencies and the politicians, but only so far; for they're not the real reason why deaths on the road are not matching the objective of a 20 per cent reduction by 2001 from the 1998 figures.
There simply isn't the popular will to cut road-deaths. You can see this in the huge number of unsecured children scrambling around inside cars, their parents unperturbed as they cheerfully weave in and out of the traffic. If people won't take rudimentary precautions for their own children, they're hardly start going to be seriously worried about the health of complete strang . . . WATCH WHERE YOU'RE GOING YOU STUPID F****INg C**T!