Tying up the Luas ends

Last Wednesday, I trotted down to St Stephen's Green to bask in the historic spectacle that was the first day of the Luas.

Bad call. The general public and I normally have an agreement - I don't go near it, and it is gleefully ignorant of my existence. Everyone's happy. But that day there were zillions of them, thronging around like vultures at the scene of a mass wildebeest suicide pact, clucking and squawking and wailing and shoving their bloody heads forward in their eagerness to get on Dublin's shiny new toy.

All right, so I exaggerate. They were all perfectly well-behaved. But there were thousands of them. I turned on my heels.

Next day, I swallowed my loathing of collective humanity and tried again. Same deal. Still millions of the buggers. And they were still as ugly and noisy as starving carrion crows. I stood in a line that stretched as far as Dawson Street, cursing myself. I was not happy. I envisaged a three-hour wait, followed by an hour crammed in a train, face buried in some German tourist's sweaty armpit.

But, to my great surprise, the queue shortened like hospital waiting lists at election time. Within a few short minutes, I was being ushered by an army of purple-clad Luasettes onto a gleaming, space-age carriage and away. It jolted out of the blocks a few times, causing much tumbling and tittering among less stable passengers, but not enough to cause concern.

Twenty-odd minutes later, we were in Sandyford Industrial Estate. Whereupon we were all shepherded off and told to wait in an equally expansive queue for our tram back again.

I stood there patiently, emitting the occasional "Baa" and grazing amongst the meagre scrub grass along the trackside. Some people, evidently being good judges of character, stared at me like I was a complete freak. Others joined in my munching, unwittingly proving my point - the general public is a very stupid beast indeed.

We got back on and another 22 minutes later, we were back in the Green. "How was it?" an eager woman at the head of the quarter-mile queue asked of me. "It was...it was - grand," I said. No more, no less.

Not awe-inspiring (although the bridge in Dundrum was pretty cool and futuristic, with the added schadenfreude of being able to see hundreds of miserable motorists trapped in endless traffic).

Nor, for that matter, was it remotely disappointing. I didn't exactly have an epiphany on the road to Balally, but then I wasn't expecting one either. I'd missed all the excitement of that unfortunate motorist getting his wing mirror lopped off on Harcourt Street, and the stand-off with the lorry driver who'd tried to get the Luas to drive around him. And nobody jumped under the wheels either.

Clean, quick, efficient, Luas does the job. Whether or not it was worth €775 million is debatable, but I'm prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt.

That said, it was pretty cunning of the RPA to open the Green Line first, running as it does through some of south Dublin's more salubrious neighbourhoods. As we all know, first impressions last. Being able to sneak a peek into the back gardens and conservatories of some of the capital's best-heeled citizens allowed the more economically-challenged of us a sort of vicarious enjoyment of wealth, albeit for a few short seconds.

Running the trams along the Red Line first, with the country's media in tow, things could have been very different. I'd like to have seen the Minister's face as we ran the gauntlet of stone-throwing mobs of rabid kids, stopping intermittently to release the debt-reneging junkies tied to the tracks by vengeful drug-dealers.

And before you Red Liners start hurling letters of complaint my direction, let me into a secret. I'm one of you. I can see the tracks in Rialto out of my window as I write this. In fact, there's some demon child hanging his little sister's bicycle off the overhead lines at this very moment. Nice to see he's getting in some practice.