The sign "N11 - Kilmacanogue to Glen of the Downs duel carriageway - expect delays for next 8km until 2003" is probably the most succinct example of semiotics, the science of signing, in Ireland. In addition to being consciously self-explanatory, its 16 words or numbers give us a wholly unintended insight into the competence of our National Roads Authority. What the authority is supposed to do is to build roads, and if you're in that business, you should really know how to spell road-words.
Listen, NRA: it's not "duel carriageway", it's "dual carriageway". Though I'm not surprised that you think a fight to the death between two people is the correct term to describe your roads, or rodes as you probably call them. Any organisation which considers that the road and bridge through Slane are so satisfactory that it has chosen not to by-pass the town presumably doesn't know the difference between dual, which essentially means shared congenially by two, and duel, which means coffee for one. They are contradictory words; and naturally, the NRA chose the wrong one. You probably spell Slane as Slain, and considering what happens there almost every week, you are in your own weird way correct.
Touching honesty
But I have to admit, there's something touching about your honesty. The fact that you are prepared to proclaim in large, mispelt signs, that it will take you at least three years to build eight kilometres of road is almost disarming. Except I am not disarmed. In that same period of time, between 1936 and 1939, in the first three years of the Nazis' Four-Year Plan, Germany built 3,000 kilometres of autobahn, some 3,300 major bridges, often involving massive structural engineering projects, and re-laid over 17,000 kilometres of existing road.
Not like with like, splutters the NRA. And that is correct. To soak up unemployment, the Nazis used as little machinery as possible. The autobahns were not built with slave labour, but with paid employees, largely using their hands. None of the great earth-moving equipment, huge lorries, JCBs or road-laying leviathans which will be available to build all eight kilometres of road over the next three years at the Glen of the Downs.
Go over the figures again. In the three years before the second World War. the German laid down 3,000 kilometres of motorway, built 3,300 bridges, and reconstructed 17,000 kilometres of road. Nor was it a matter of totalitarian inducement. The Germans completed their autobahn network in the 1950s, with comparable productivity. In Wicklow, over three years, how many kilometres of road are going to be built? A whole eight. Or, as they say in the Nashunal Rodes Orthoritee, Ate.
50m of road a week
It's hardly surprising that the NRA felt able earlier this year to trumpet that its road-building programme is ahead of schedule. If its targets are as heady as those set out in the Glen of the Downs, about 50 metres of road a week, just over a cricket-pitch length each working day, we are not exactly talking about "The Creation". But of course, I've not taken into account the possibility that some of the N11 project might involve the construction of major roundabouts; for though the species is almost extinct everywhere else in the developed world, it lives on in the roundabout sanctuary that this country has become.
Ireland is a wildlife safari park of roundabouts. Not merely is it illegal to shoot roundabouts here, it is illegal to build major roads without them. An added touch, unique to Ireland, is to add traffic lights to them. This is a major design feature which no other country has been able to perfect, the equivalent of cardiac transplant surgery in which you replace a dicky heart with a blocked bowel.
It doesn't work, but then it's not supposed to. It's meant to give the appearance of working on paper, which it invariably does. The actual reality is testified to each morning and evening, as the slightly hysterical voices from AA Roadwatch shrilly warn us of the rectal coronary thromboses occurring at the various traffic light-controlled roundabouts the length of the M50.
Roundabout heaven
Nor is it hard to work out why these thromboses occur. Traffic lights are mandatory systems of control; roundabouts are discretionary. Installed at the same place, each eliminates the advantages of the other. Moreover, roundabouts not merely do not separate traffic into streams, but actually conjoin vehicles coming from opposite and lateral directions. Traffic moving east to west is mingled with traffic moving north-south for absolutely no reason but to ensure that roundabouts don't get bored, for this, after all, is roundabout heaven.
In other countries, when they close down roundabouts, our National Roads Authority snaps them up and sends them back home for construction where they can do most damage to traffic movement. There probably is a great roundabout reception camp somewhere in an uninhabited region of Laois where they are taught some of the basic techniques of traffic obstruction, and where in the evening he-roundabouts hang about in large gangs whistling at the curvaceous bollards of comely she-roundabouts. Maybe, as night falls, there are secret roundabout trysts, and these young roundabouts couple and make baby roundabouts.
And sometimes young males fall out with one another over the favours of a luscious young roundaboutetta from Italy. Words are exchanged. A blow is struck, a challenge issued, and seconds appointed. But where will they meet to settle this matter of roundabout honour?
On a duel carriageway, of course.