The Red Cow roundabout says all that Kevin Myers needs to know about how Ireland is managed.
It takes incompetence and stupidity on a quite Olympian scale to blend traffic coming from the south, the east into and out of Dublin, and most traffic from the North to Munster, into the one circular system. Elsewhere, the standard rule is that the complete separation of vehicles moving in different directions is vital for efficient traffic management.
At the Red Cow, however, we put all such traffic into the one blender, so that even traffic going in opposite directions, and which should never touch, now manage to contribute to the jams obstructing one another.
Moreover, we mixed two different traffic-management systems. We combine the personal initiative-based roundabout with the command-based traffic light: like putting turf into a petrol engine.
We didn't do this on the Soloheadbeg-Fethard cow-track, which would have been bad enough: no, we did this on the busiest traffic exchange in the entire country, where traffic orbiting the capital, and entering from and going to the south, the north and the west, conjoin: nearly one million vehicles a week meeting at a football pitch.
It wasn't a totally unique experiment in structural cretinism: we did exactly the same for traffic going to Belfast, which has to compete for space on the same roundabout with traffic going to Dublin Airport. But the Red Cow Roundabout is the piece de resistance of state imbecility. The M 50 has probably cost £1 billion: the Red Cow is the ha'p'orth of missing tar.
Most of us assumed that the Luas system was going to spare its travellers the Byzantine horrors of the RCR: that they would be immune to the traffic jams into which thousands of people have disappeared in recent years, never to be seen again. Wrong.
For now we know that the Luas trams are in fact going to enter the Red Cow Roundabout space-competition: and far from Luas reducing the delays at this vast folly, it will increase them.
The Luas will have to negotiate three lights each way at the roundabout, at three level crossings. Six in all, in and out, 70 seconds a time. And car drivers will park on and obstruct the tracks at the level crossings, because they're usually desperate to be free of this mad-cow-disease roundabout.
We know this, just as we know that Irish lorry drivers are specially trained to enter those yellow boxes at rush hour when all exits from it are blocked, and stay there, picking their noses, just as gardai are trained to turn their backs when they see this happen.
So to sneak any advantage, some Red Cow drivers will creep onto the tracks, and the trams might have to wait till the track is clear, possibly not once, but even thrice. Moreover, since the lights will be green for Luas for 70 seconds every two and a half minutes, road-traffic on the most congested roundabout in the State will lose nearly half the time currently allocated to it. Listen to AA Roadwatch and weep.
It gets better. Traffic from Dublin entering the M-50 to go northwards - as hundreds of lorries from the industrial estates do - will face four traffic lights in about 200 circular yards. The icing on the roundabout cake is this: some 5,000 extra lorries per day will soon enter the Red Cow system to reach the docks when Dublin City Tunnel opens, while the roundabout closes ever two minutes or so to let a train through.
The Red Cow Roundabout is the Most Favoured Place of breakdown in Ireland, and it's also where people behave like Nazis. Never give space; never give way; jump the lights; sound the horn; yield not an inch. It's where the Celtic Tiger caught rabies.
And into this over-crowded cauldron of aggression and stupidity and frustration, the most congested roundabout in Ireland - and at vast capital cost - the State is introducing a light railway system. A jolly good idea. And since we're at it, put Busarus on the Red Cow Roundabout. And the new terminal for Dublin Airport. And the Bertie Bowl, and perhaps Houston Station as well.
The Luas project exemplifies everything about state projects. We bought trams years before they could be of use, since when they've been rusting in storage at - where else? - the Red Cow Roundabout: and meanwhile not earning a penny while we were paying for them.
The Americans got a man on the moon in the time we've spent on Luas, and it still isn't close to running.
And then you read the explanation - "the decision on Luas was taken a long time ago, when maybe traffic levels were less". Jesus Christ Almighty; that was supposed to be the bloody point of Luas - that it was intended to cope with future demand.
Now this would be bad enough if it were an exception: but it's not. It's the norm. Those who undertake any major state enterprise in this country seem to think that planning is something you need permission for and foresight is a saga on television.
Wherever we find government or political involvement anywhere in this country, at best we find incompetence and stupidity of Red Cow proportions: at worst we find corruption and criminality. The State's response to all this? Well, it's to transfer money confiscated from the citizens going gibberingly berserk at the Red Cow Roundabout into the pockets of lawyers, and then to carry on as before.
Wake me up someone. This nightmare's gone on long enough.