The German ADAC motoring organisation recently produced a report on the motorway service stations of Europe. The worst was in Britain, at Sandbach, between Birmingham and Manchester, writes Kevin Myers.
"The lavatories were filthy, paper crumpled on the floor, the flush was not working, the doors damaged," it reported. "The shower was filthy, as was the nappy-changing room." ADAC didn't report on the conditions of Ireland's motorway service stations - because, of course, we haven't got any. Or rather we have but they're unofficial caravans, usually parked not alongside our motorways, but just off the dual carriageways linking with them. The lavatory in such places is a hedge - why, just the place for you girls; the nappy-changing room is the hedge beside it; and the shower room is also known as the weather.
These informal Irish truck-stops are potentially lethal places. Vehicles are parked higgledy-piggledy everywhere. There are no proper points of exit or egress, and lorries parked on the hard shoulder block the view of drivers pulling out from behind them. Crashes are highly likely in such locations, but of course nothing is done about them - because, well, that would mean someone going to some trouble, and oh dear me, we wouldn't want that, now would we?
These are not on motorways, but on semi-motorways like the N7 Naas Road. Our actual motorways do not even have these rudimentary, ad hoc facilities - yet another daring experiment by the National Roads Authority, the hyper-boffins who gave us the Red Cow Roundabout. Never mind that the Americans have had their national highways for 80 years, the Germans their autobahns and the Italians their autostradas for 70, the French their autoroutes for 60, and the British their motorways for 50 years. No, indeed: we intend to learn lessons from no one in these - or indeed any other - matters.
So instead of adopting the weak, cowardly course of benefiting from the experiences of others, we go our own way, learning whatever lessons by trial and error, proudly scorning the undignified process of learning by acquired knowledge.
I've written about this all before, but I'll go over it again, because some issues - such as the criminal folly known as the Red Cow Roundabout - can bear endless revisiting. If you drive from Cork and Limerick towards Belfast, the last petrol station you meet before reaching the Border is near Kill on the Naas road. In the remaining hundred miles to Northern Ireland, you will encounter no petrol station (never mind café, rest-stop, or toilets, not so speak of poor, wretched Sandbach's dirty shower or nappy-changing room) until you hit South Armagh, where you are suddenly assailed by a bristling throng of petrol stations.
Needless to say, the nincompoops in the NRA, apparently having as much foresight as a deep-fried mole in earth-orbit, haven't even provided a warning sign near Kill that you are entering Europe's pioneering experiment in fuel-free roads. Moreover, if it's late in the evening, and the Kill station is closed, and you're heading for the Border, and you're running short of petrol or diesel, well, my friend, you are well and truly trucked. The prospect of being marooned on a hard shoulder at 2 a.m. enchants few of us: women possibly have stronger views on the subject.
Everyone else in the world who has constructed such highways has found it essential to create central areas providing fuel, food and lavatories, usually operating round the clock. Yet it is actually NRA policy not to provide such service stations.
The longest NRA motorway sections are those around Dublin, from the N7 and the southern end of the M50 which link with the M1 to the North. Throughout this entire network of roads, containing possible journey times of three hours or even more, there are no service stations of any kind.
Who made this NRA policy? How beneficial is it to the gaggle of petrol stations, wheezing their hysterically joyous welcomes to exhausted strangers tottering into South Armagh? And who owns those petrol stations?
But even to ask such questions suggests that there might be some coherence in NRA planning, when there clearly isn't. How could we have an overspend on our roads of over €9 billion? How could one third of roads be two years late in completion? And most bizarrely, how could the Glen of the Downs bypass be finished 18 months early? For finishing a project two entire human pregnancies early suggests that whoever designed its time-frame has as much understanding of road-building as that baffled little mole in earth-orbit.
Such an epic blunder should properly have caused resignations and dismissals - because the price of the contract is surely related to the duration of the project. But if there was a boardroom massacre in the NRA, it was done with Borgian stealth and efficiency - which rather rules the NRA out.
Ah, but the NRA is both a macro- and micro-bungler. We've all met the road-sign, posted precisely at a junction, which drivers have nearly passed before seeing it, thereby tempting them to attempt dangerous, last-moment turns. The exit from the N3 into the Blanchardstown shopping centre offers similar dangers to drivers. There are exit stripes leading up to it, but no white line leading from the N3 up the exit ramp, so drivers waiting for such guidance are nearly past the exit before they realise that there is no such visual assistance - and only then do they turn.
To be sure, these questions worry me greatly - but not as much as the fact that no-one ever seems to ask them in Dáil Éireann.