Emissions Kilian DoyleIt's 2004. Chinese year of the monkey, no less. I foresee great things. I will (hopefully) live to regret this, but here's a few tenuously motoring-related predictions for the year to come.
One: Mr Brennan will build scores of new roads bypassing the scores of towns that are currently being strangled by traffic. Then he will install loads of toll booths on aforementioned thoroughfares in order to raise hundreds of millions of euro for the Government to squander on nonsense, like fancy haircuts for Bertie and frocks for his three Marys. Except it won't work out quite as planned. The Irish, a sleeveen race if ever there was one, will merely dodge the tollbooths by ploughing through the towns they were previously trying so desperately to avoid, all in the name of getting one over on the tax collectors. Just look at what happened with the truckers in Drogheda.
Two: A similar scenario will unfold when the powers that be move to reduce the number of parking spaces in Dublin to discourage motorists from venturing into the city. They'll come anyway. And just park illegally. Now, there's a surprise.
Three: The 1,500 driving instructors who have been threatened with either passing a test or losing their teaching licence will carry on regardless. They're being given three years to comply with the new regulations. If I was them, I'd be confidently assuming that by the time the deadline looms in late 2006, the whole notion will have been forgotten.
Four: Jeremy Clarkson and his supercilious, sycophantic cronies on Top Gear and other car programmes will continue to wet themselves over new cars capable of hitting three times the motorway speed limit and deride the rest of us as losers because we don't have a few hundred grand to throw away on a car we can only drive on disused airstrips. You're sooo macho Jeremy, you big tiger.
Five: Formula One will be won by a boring man in a red car. This is a complete no-brainer, one I won't dignify by elaborating upon.
Six: Our Great Liberator, GW Bush, will invade at least one more oil-producing country. My money's on Venezuela - fourth-largest oil producer on the planet, pitiful army, socialist government and a president, Hugo Chavez, who seems increasingly fond of spending weekends with Cuba's Fidel Castro on Caribbean island hideaways, plotting the downfall of imperialism.
Venezuela's only known weapons of mass destruction are some implausibly gorgeous women capable of reducing men to jibbering wrecks, but then such minor details never stopped Dubya before.
Seven: SUVs will get bigger and bigger until they swallow the planet. This will correlate directly with the shrinking of the brains, wallets and moral standards of the muppets who drive them.
Eight: Bertie will attempt to swing the axe in his June cabinet reshuffle. Our Mr Brennan will huff and puff and refuse to move. See, Seamus is making the rest of them look bad. Despite the fact that his position is rapidly resembling that of Sisyphus, at least he's still trying to get the boulder up the hill, unlike the rest of his colleagues who've adjourned to the pub, muttering about "leaving the fecking thing where it is".
And Bertie doesn't like being shown up. No siree. I sense a revolution in the offing and talk of kebabs.
Nine: I'll finally pass my driving test. At the age of 34. (This one is conditional, however, upon me ever getting a date for it. Six months and counting. Now I know what it feels like to be a pensioner in need of a new hip.)
Ten: Err, that's it. What am I, Nostradamus?