An Irishman's Diary

This was a day to dread, the day that Volvo brought out a 4x4 estate car

This was a day to dread, the day that Volvo brought out a 4x4 estate car. You see, Volvo drivers have long been among the most intimidating drivers in Ireland. They seem to possess the demonic imperturbability of the skipper of the USS Nimitz if he fitted it with wheels and took it up the Naas dual-carriageway, writes Kevin Myers.

Volvo drivers think they're immortal because they drive the second safest cars in the world: the safest are in car museums. They are not especially aggressive, but they are sublimely nonchalant as they overtake into the teeth of an oncoming juggernaut hauling a boiler for a power station. The Volvo driver is usually confident about the outcome - and he's right.

I mean "he". I've never seen a woman drive a Volvo. Maybe if the car was called a Venebo more females would scramble into the driver's seat; but as it is, it seems a uniquely male car, perhaps as much because of the size as anything else. Seeing most women attempt to reverse a tea-cup onto a saucer can be tragic enough. Watching a woman reverse a car the size of a cricket pitch would be past all human endurance.

However, there is a species of large vehicle which women do revel in: the upholstered 4 x 4 sports utility vehicles. And before a woman is allowed to drive one of these beasts, she is apparently sent to a hairdresser, where her hair is dyed blonde.

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Then she goes to the Rayband plant in Texas, where a set of sunglasses are super-glued to her skull.

And most important of all, she is sent to The Irish Lorry Drivers' School of Motoring, where he is taught how to turn left or right, and how to negotiate a roundabout - the most vital part of this manoeuvre being the use of a mobile-phone from beginning to end. You cannot pass ILDSM test unless you corner while talking into a phone held to your ear. Instant failure if you do not.

(Other requirements for male drivers - but not female - at the ILDSM include a daily consumption of 15 lbs of sausages, 10 rashers, a pound of white pudding, and a couple of eggs, fried in lard, in order to give our lorry drivers the Irish Breakfast Face, without which no lorry driver is allowed to pass his test.)

Thus with mobile phone, sunglasses and bleached hair, SUV she-drivers are equipped to take on the world - namely drive their four-wheel-drive vehicle, which can climb the north face of Kilimanjaro and cross the Irish Sea in a Force 10 gale, from Foxrock to Stillorgan to collect their children from school, hurriedly reaching for their mobile phones every time they come to a roundabout or a corner.

Thus there was a sexual apartheid which sort of worked: male Volvo drivers driving up the wrong carriageway of the M50 because there was less traffic going in the same direction, and mums using 2 per cent of the technological capacities of their 4x Land Rover Outback Warrior or their Toyota Kalahari while driving to the Montessori or mastering a particularly difficult shop at Superquinn.

But the Mandela of motoring is out of jail: vehicular apartheid is crumbling as the Volvo XC 90 enters our roads. It is a Volvo, no doubt with all the invulnerability that one might expect; but it is also a 4x4. It will therefore entitle the male to drive with invulnerable aggression in the wrong lane at 120 m.p.h. and the female to attend to those complex tasks, such as getting her roots done and collecting that bottle of extra-virgin olive oil from Morton's, for which an all-terrain, cross-country, mountain-climbing amphibious jeep is absolutely essential.

Prices start at about €62,000,basic, but can go up to about €750,000 if you go for the aircraft carrier version, complete with Harrier jump-jet deck in order to see off the other mums in the hunt for that last parking space at Superquinn, which you can then spend a week trying to reverse into. Price was once a factor in controlling the supply of any commodity into Ireland. Not any more. Price is as irrelevant as tyre pressure when you're buying a vehicle these days.

The XC 90 is vast. So, if you're late for the school run, you can give the children the fitted bath in the back; or if bored, you can let them practise on the dry-slope ski-run in the boot. It even comes - and this is the literal truth - equipped with two mobile phones, presumably one for each ear. So you can ring yourself and chat away while you go round roundabouts, without having to wonder too much about the quality of your conversation (though I would suspect that this is not normally too much of a preoccupation).

So far 125 of these vehicles are on the roads of Ireland - and perish the thought that I would think badly of their drivers. But I suspect the XC 90 could drive either through the Great Pyramid or over it with equal ease, and sooner or later its drivers will know it. This sense of immunity does things to the human brain.

Perhaps it might be a nice idea if AA Roadwatch put this Volvo on the list of things to watch out for: There's an articulated lorry jackknifed at the Red Cow Roundabout, a couple of buses are copulating on the north quays in Dublin, and, Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph, there's an effing XC 90 on

the N 11.