Look how far we've come

The golden silence here in the dusty, cobwebbed corridors of Emissions Towers was broken recently by a phone call. 'Twas from a nice chap seeking some words of wisdom on a new TV programme he was researching.

I told him he was on to the wrong place. "No wisdom here, buddy, just sarky cynicism."

"That's grand," said he. "A bit of sarky cynicism will do nicely."

He told me said programme is about the major upheavals in Irish society in the past couple of decades.

"Jayckers," said I. "More dreadful compilations of archive footage of Gaybo interviewing Sinéad O'Connor on the Late Late sandwiched between a rake of shots of Ryanair air hostesses and Dr Eamon 'Pantsdown' Casey. Just what we need."

"No, no, none of that rubbish," said he. "It's all about how society has changed from being grey and grumpy and broke and downtrodden, to being all shiny and new and confident and loaded. And I thought you might have some ideas about how cars fit in the general picture."

I did. We had a long natter. He had obviously been thinking about it, had way more ideas on the subject than I, if truth be told. ("You realise I'll nick all this for my column, don't you?" I said to him at one stage. "Quid pro quo, Clarice, quid pro quo. Fffffffhhhfffffhhh")

We decided the car has played an integral role in shaping the new Ireland, up there with tax evasion, satellite television, the end of emigration and Hello! magazine in making us what we are today.

We've come a long way from the bleak mid-1980s. We've got the highest car-ownership per capita in the European Union. That's partly due to necessity - our public transport system is trailing most of Western Europe's like a two-legged donkey in the Grand National - and partly due to raw cash.

The car, more than anything, has changed the landscape of the country. Over 170,000 of them were sold here last year.

Roads that were formerly winding, potholed boreens trundled down by crotchety farmers in clapped-out Ford Escorts have been transmogrified into ruler straight motorways traversed at high speeds by top of the range German engineering. Twenty years ago, you'd have more chance of seeing a Blue Whale than a Porsche in Ireland. Nowadays, every second hairdresser has one.

Motorways, we agreed, feel distinctly un-Irish. Like most people over 25, my first glimpse of a motorway was on a foreign holiday. These space-age contraptions were, to my Star Wars-obsessed mind, like some alien trans-galactic highway, all shiny metal barriers and incandescent orange lights and speed, speed, speed. Put them in Ireland and they'd stick out like rollerskates on a mackerel.

Now that they're everywhere, they still feel a bit odd, to be honest. That'll be the fact half of them are covered in parked cars or protesting toll-dodging truckers.

Quaint little villages once surrounded by green fields are now encircled by rambling estates of commuter-coops and shopping malls.

The commuter phenomenon begs the chicken and egg question - did people move miles out from cities because they had cars, or get cars because they moved miles out of cities?

Twenty years ago you'd have been locked up for even contemplating the viability of a daily 120-mile round-trip commute to work in Dublin. The only nutters who spent five hours a day in cars were taxi drivers. Nowadays, tens of thousands of harried and harassed commuters do it with nary a thought. Possibly because the poor unfortunates are rendered brain dead by the drudgery of it all. So, is it progress? Are we any better off? Sure, many of us have wealth and luxury cars, mothers aren't forced to kiss their job-seeking kids goodbye at airports, Brown Thomas has never been busier. But are we happier? Eh?

There's a thesis in that somewhere, sociology students. Just don't go ringing me. I'm off to run around on the motorway with my lightsabre.