Dead-on excuse

I warn you here and now, this week's column is an unashamedly angry rant. Readers of a timid disposition or guilty conscience may be well advised to look away now.

I'm full of bile. So much so that I've fashioned a makeshift bib out of my copy of the Transport 21 prospectus in an effort to catch the excess gunk bubbling out of my mouth. And yes, that's as attractive as it sounds.

My current condition began with an item in last week's Motors about police in Sydney investigating 240 people for using a dead man to avoid their speeding fines.

Ever-rational, my initial reading of it made me think they'd propped the dude up in their driver's seats so his decomposing mug came out in speed camera snaps instead of their own. How did that work? Was there some crazed funeral director renting him out for this very purpose? Was the deceased sitting on their laps as they drove? And what about the smell? This required further investigation.

So I reread the article. Turns out I'd lost the run of myself again. (I blame leaky fuel pipes in my car. The fumes have the aul'd brain addled off me.) There were no cruising corpses at all. Instead these cunning folk had all simply named the same man, who's been dead for five years, as the person who was driving their vehicle when it was spotted speeding.

"Cheeky gits," said I. "Should be ashamed of themselves. Arra, suren whaddya expect from a shower of convicts."

Thus began a brief period of sanctimonious scoffing at our Antipodean cousins. But I stopped when I came to the tragic realisation that we Irish are no better. In fact, I daresay there's a few hundred sleeveens checking the death notices for alibis as I write.

And thus I embarked upon the bilious path leading to where I find myself today. Tragic, so it is, to see a man formerly renowned for his room-brighteningly sunny disposition reduced to a bitter, seething hulk of resentful indignation. I despair for the future of my child and her unborn sibling, I really do.

We are a nation of chancers, crooks, connivers and cheats, a race of underhanded gutterscrabblers constantly trying to get one over on each other through whatever means necessary. I get angrier by the hour when I witness the way Irish drivers act, get more disgusted with every loathsome scam I stumble across.

Speaking ill of the dead to dodge a speeding fine is the tip of the proverbial pancake. There's far more reprehensible shenanigans going on every day. Though minor enough in themselves, collectively, they point to a breakdown of respect for others, a merciless avalanche of Mé Féinism that will, brought to its logical conclusion, leave the country in a moral vacuum where only those prepared to trample others into the ground will survive.

For instance, there are the drivers who plonk their fat SUVs - and even fatter kids - across disabled parking spots. ("Call Joe Duffy!" I exclaim sarcastically every time I see one skip out of their toy tractor, sprightly as a coked-up spring lamb. "It's a fricken miracle!" Amazingly, I haven't been punched yet.)

And then there are the drivers who flick cigarette butts out of windows without checking for cyclists, like the looderamawn who hit me square in the face with a Silk Cut some weeks back. It'll be months before my eyebrows grow back.

I could go on. But I have neither space nor, more importantly, time. I'm in a rush to get to the Garda station before they all knock off to watch Fair City. I feel it's my civic duty to apply for a gun licence so I can stand on a motorway bridge and take potshots at mobile-using motorists. It's the least I can do.