Operation Freeflow is under way in the centre of Dublin, which means, of course, that throughout the height of the Christmas shopping season there will be on-street parking, that Dublin Corporation will be stopping its bin lorries in the centre of tiny, already overcrowded streets, and drivers for breweries will shamelessly and unpunished leave their beer lorries on double yellow lines while they deliver to pubs.
Dublin is the most maladminstered and inefficiently policed capital city in Europe. In no other metropolis are garbage collection and major deliveries by slow-moving or static lorries performed during office hours. In no other city is signposting so contemptibly contemptuous of the needs of ordinary citizens or visitors. In no other city do bus drivers think they have a right to depart early from their terminus merely "because they are ready". The rule of law is a joke in Dublin, traffic management a calamity, municipal skills still-born, and public accountability among public officials simply non-existent.
Catastrophic effects
Politicians who have made imbecilic policy-changes, ones which must have had catastrophic effects on people's lives, are not reviled for what they have done. How many people are dead because of the truly cretinous decision to allow unaccompanied learner-drivers out on the roads? How many people have paid the ultimate price because of the higher speeds encouraged by the decision years ago to raise the general speed limit to 60 m.p.h,, even on tiny country lanes where it is dangerous to drive at only half that speed?
All over the country, local communities whose roads have been invaded by rat-running drivers looking for high-speed shortcuts have been erecting "SLOW DOWN" signs, which of course have no meaning in law. It is permissible to drive at 60 m.p.h. on such roads, and a motorist who slams into a mother pushing her child in a buggy will probably not be punished if he has been driving within the speed limit.
Nor is it a matter merely of political failure; the judicial failure to exact due punishment on the seriously delinquent reinforces the culture of ethical fecklessness which infests this State. Put this alongside the odious self-congratulation and the unspeakable smugness which have resulted from the economic boom of the past few years, and what you have is a society which now seems lost to all sense of moral order.
That is not just Dublin's problem: it is Ireland's. Where once poor signposting or inadequate law-enforcement could be explained by lack of resources, this is no longer the case. Right across the country, there is a failure to care at every level; and this failure expresses itself in a mΘ-fΘinism of pathological proportions, both individually and organisationally.
If you think that law enforcement is bad now, wait until computerisation of the Garda S∅ochβna gets under way. Then shall we know the meaning of bureaucratic nightmare. Far from the new system making prosecution simpler and swifter, it will make it more complex and slower - so much so that many garda∅ will simply not be bothered with the hours of computer time even the most minor case will take. In other words, the actual enforcement of law in Ireland will no longer occur.
Series of aspirations
Instead, law will be a series of aspirations in our statute books, with perhaps a handful of especially dedicated garda∅ managing to press home the odd prosecution through a computer system which is almost impossible to operate.
No doubt within this moral slum, in which hundreds of people die needlessly every year, the morality police will continue their truly insane campaign against massage parlours, in which all participants are volunteers and nobody dies; but at least a few prosecutions, perhaps aided by some high-flown piffle from a judge, will give the appearance of a crackdown on crime. And after all, appearances and moral posturing from the bench are all that really count in this fundamentally immoral mΘ fΘin republic of ours.
I have written about this administrative and legal failure on countless occasions, to no avail, and this week this newspaper is carrying a five-part special series on the calamity of our roads policy. It won't make any difference. Our political climate is diseased: selfish populism governs all, and the worst and the basest group instincts must be appeased. In this perverse trade-off, the grotesque maladministration of both our capital city and our national roads network is seen to be the price of personal freedom from the rule of law.
Political party
What would happen to the political party which proposed that no learner-driver may drive unaccompanied? What would happen to the party which promised to retire those cretinous old district justices whose aberrant whimsy has permitted so many young killers back onto the roads, and which promised to appoint a new breed of vigorous judges in their stead?
What would happen to any party which promised to introduce a ruthlessly single-purpose traffic police? What would happen the party which promised a fast-track administration of law that would liberate individual garda∅ from spending hundreds of hours a year shuffling outside courts, waiting to be called? Political extinction would await it. It's that simple.
Everywhere one can see the moral torpor which is daily making this country more and more unendurable - the parents who don't belt in their children in their cars, the overtaking on blind bends and over double white lines, the refusal to give way to people coming out of side roads, the insensate aggression even in supermarket car-parks.
We have created murderous chaos in which everyone is to blame except ourselves; in reality, what we have is what we want.