TheLastStraw/Frank McNally: Most people agree that the former minister for transport was unlucky to be demoted this week. He was a man in a hurry this past two years, always pushing ahead with new initiatives - from reform of the Mad Cow Roundabout to the proposed introduction of metric speed limits.
But now that his career has entered the temporary 30 m.p.h. zone of the Department of Social and Family Affairs, it might be a good time for us all to slow down and ask if we're not being too rash with this whole metric signage thing.
I know I've been critical in the past of the absurdity of the current road-sign system. But the need to be consistent has never held this column back before. And I've come to think that the idea of showing distances in kilometres and speed limits in miles has a uniquely Irish charm that we should think twice about losing.
Granted, it's not as important to tourism as our system of directional road signs, which ensures that visitors are lost most of the time, thereby forcing them to interact with locals, and exposing them to the casual eloquence for which Irish people are world-famous. But it adds to the tourists' general confusion, which must surely be of some value. And as an example of tradition and modernity walking hand in hand, it's the sort of thing the travel guides love.
By drawing on two languages - miles and kilometres - the road-sign system also mirrors the way we Irish speak. In fact, our road signs share many of the same qualities of our everyday speech. They can be entertaining, eccentric, argumentative - neighbouring signs often disagree with each other, sometimes violently - and they love to cluster in towns and villages like locals conversing in a pub. The multiplicity of signposts at certain junctions in Ireland has become a tourist attraction in itself, even featuring on postcards.
But as with Irish conversation, road signs are not always designed to communicate, even when there's a lot of them. It might be worth recalling that the word "Blarney" - meaning gift of the gab - originated in the epic verbal delaying tactics of a chieftain as he attempted to prevent the castle of the same name falling into the hands of the English in 1602. And Ireland's long history of colonisation should be borne in mind by anyone criticising the lack of useful information in road signs here.
After all, the local authorities that provide the signs don't necessarily know who you are, and why you're looking for directions here in the first place.
In some parts of Ireland, the system is clearly designed to prevent good-quality intelligence on the whereabouts of the nearest town, and thus to prevent it falling into the wrong hands. Of course, sometimes this is achieved through the simple absence of signage, and again there are parallels with speech here.
Enter a bar in south Armagh, for example, and - especially if you look like a policeman - you'll find that the Irish love of conversation dries up quickly.
So it is with signposts. Drive into parts of rural Ireland, and, like silence falling on a pub, road signs will suddenly become conspicuous by their absence. Arriving at yet another unmarked crossroads, you'll often hear yourself wondering out loud, in exasperation: "Which way do I go here?" But the roads will just sneak quietly away in different directions, leaving you none the wiser.
More typically, however, road junctions will drop hints - sometimes playful, sometimes cryptic - as to your whereabouts. They may even give you a sporting chance. A common phenomenon at the rural crossroads is a signpost identifying three directions, but not the fourth. The unmarked road is like the mystery prize in a TV game show. It might just be your intended destination. It might not. You can either go home with what you have already, or you can take a chance.
But getting back to my point (I obviously missed a turn there somewhere), the road-sign system is part of what we are, and of what makes Ireland interesting. If nothing else, our signposts are conversation pieces. Which is presumably why so many of them are missing, diverted to pubs in New York and San Francisco, where they point nowhere in particular, but provide the perfect backdrop for nostalgic conversations about the old country.
Speed limit signs are not as popular as distance ones - either here, or in Irish pubs abroad. And in any case, the move to metric may be so far advanced as to be irreversible. But I note that the new Minister for Transport is from a constituency with a Gaeltacht. At the very least, he could insist that the new kilometre speed signs would also carry translations into mileage, if only as a link to the past.