Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland
Each weekday morning, as the sun peeks over the horizon and the birds contemplate breakfast, a crazy ritual begins. People stumble from their houses - ties half-knotted, Coco Pops half-digested - and dash from their driveways in an effort to get out ahead of the traffic. Each year the start time creeps forward. You used to be safe at 7.30am. Then it was 7am. Now the roads began to clog at 6.30am. Minutes are vital. Dawdle over that second slice of toast and you'll be crawling all the way. Take five seconds longer to button your pants and it'll add half an hour to the journey. All this, by the way, is just for the drive to the railway station. Trying to get a parking space is a whole other problem.
The commute is a twice-daily psychological test. A prodding of our patience and a poking of our dignity. For a few hours a day little veins pop on foreheads across the country; obscenities are hissed through grinding teeth. It pits us against one another, strips us of our civility. We're all in it together but interested only in ourselves. Train passengers rush for the doors like disaster victims spotting an aid package. Once aboard, it is a scene from hell (if hell has a little flashing map telling you which circle you have stopped at). You are squished between someone with her Walkman on full blast and a sweaty man with a bad cough, forced to share personal space with people you wouldn't ordinarily want to share a galaxy with.
Not everyone chooses to travel by engine, of course. There is the occasional brave cyclist en route to work. Head down in the rain, battling against the wind. Dealing with the sudden disappearance of the cycle lane. Muttering a prayer every time a truck thunders by and the air sucks at the bicycle's spokes. But for the rest of us, whether in car, bus or train, the rush hour means going nowhere. You're stuck in a queue at a motorway exit nobody can get out of. Sitting in a bus lane behind a row of flash car drivers who assume the law does not apply to them. Stopped for 10 minutes on a Dart outside Connolly Station, with no explanation of why.
Everyone so often, the State acts like bothersome Greek god and throws in another challenge to your stoicism. An unnecessary toll bridge on a motorway, for instance, or those digital read-outs at railway stations that insist your train has arrived when it clearly has not. It all has a profound cumulative effect. Were this any other area of life, counsellors would be on stand-by at platforms to assist the traumatised, with mental-health professionals at every major roundabout.