Is Donegal Ireland's Never Never Land for boy racers?

EMISSIONS:Doughnuts, Honda Civics and John Travolta – sure what else is there to do?

THEY’RE MAD for cars in Donegal. Unfortunately, not always in a good way.

For, as I recently witnessed first-hand, the whole joint is riddled with that most contemptible of creatures – the boy racer. Their footprints are everywhere. There are so many doughnut marks between Creeslough and Kilmacrennan that they can be seen from space; Downings is so swathed in black streaks it looks like it has been attacked by Jackson Pollock wielding a tar brush; and every second ditch in Inishowen contains the rotting corpse of a 1994 Honda Civic.

Maybe it’s my age, or the fact that my IQ is above 14, but I fail to see the attraction in doing handbrake turns and doughnuts on a public road. Why not simply scrawl some male genitalia on your forehead with an indelible marker and go at your tyres with a belt sander? Same effect – far less effort.

All this raises the question: Why is it that Donegal is such a hotbed of these idiots?

Is it because road racing has become a teenage rite of passage in Donegal like passing out drunk at the local disco has in the rest of the country? Or do Donegal’s youths drive everywhere like they are being chased by the Taliban because their employment and entertainment prospects are so bleak that it’s the only release from the existentialist dread that haunts them? Or maybe, living as they do in a land of twisting boreens, the mere sight of 20 yards of straight road gives them temporary psychosis and they put the boot down involuntarily?

Possibly a mixture of all of the above. But more likely, as a friend of mind from that direction suspects, they do it because they know they’ll probably get away with it.

I’m inclined to believe him. One suspects the average Donegal garda has given up trying to stem the seemingly endless supply of adrenalised numpties willing to risk everything for teenage kicks.

I can understand why. If you were a cop in Donegal, would you bother your voluptuous backside chasing some gouger in your clapped-out Mondeo if you saw him tearing past you sideways on a mountain pass at 100mph? Or would you pretend you hadn’t seen him, pray for him to crash into a wall instead of a schoolbus and go home to your family, another day closer to your well-deserved pension?

Of course, the Garda top brass deny having thrown in the towel, even claiming to have had great success in tackling boyracers after last month’s Donegal International Rally, which sees rabid flocks of these amoeba-brained morons crawl out from under every slimy rock for miles around.

They proudly announced that they’d made several arrests for dangerous driving, particularly on the N13 out of Letterkenny, where what the county’s senior traffic cop described as “a bit of nonsense” left the road surface covered with more rubber than a blue whale at an S&M party.

To give them credit, the cops do occasionally score the odd victory against the doughnuteers. A mechanic was recently dragged before a judge after being observed doing three doughnuts in downtown Dunfanaghy before tearing through a stop sign while a crowd of fellow halfwits cheered him on.

The sad thing is that, not only was he driving a 1987 Vauxhall Carlton, which was a rubbish car then and is a laughable shed now, but he was a grizzled old fool of 24. That's like turning up to a rave in Ibiza dressed as John Travolta in Saturday Night Feverand busting some moves. Pathetic.

Judge Kevin Kilraine was equally unimpressed, noting that the defendant was “a bit long in the tooth for this sort of nonsense” before fining him €400 for dangerous driving.

Personally, I’d have used the opportunity to send a warning to the rest of Donegal’s speed-addled galoots and given him a lobotomy. But that’s just me.