PERHAPS the greatest contribution that Ireland has made to the practice of the dysfunctional democracy is the first cousin of the Quango (the quasi-autonomous, non-government organisation). It is the DUPFA: the Democratically Unaccountable Publicly Financed Autonomy. The first DUPFA was created when Sean Lemass nationalised two institutions that Fianna Fail hated -- the traditionally unionist Great Southern Railways and William Martin Murphy's Dublin Tramway Company. Thus was born the great national haemorrhage that we know as CIE. For decades, this DUPFA bled taxpayers' money in many, many insane ways, until its conduct became so outrageous that finally the Torpid Denizens of Leinster House were obliged to wake up to its delinquencies.
Other DUPFAs have recently come to the attention of our TDs, most famously FAS, and some level of accountability imposed. But one DUPFA remains autonomous, inept and bizarrely hubristic, as it continues to heap bad decision upon idiotic ones: the National Roads Authority (NRA).
A small stretch of the N7 south from Dublin near Kill illustrates pretty well how the NRA works. The upgrade of the road to near-motorway standards was completed in recent years. This means that even with merely moderate rainfall, so poorly constructed are the camber and the drainage that water puddles dangerously on the road. This has obliged the NRA to place flashing flood-warning signs; and naturally, these continued to warn of imminent floods throughout one of the longest droughts in recent times. But that is the Irish way: the "Beware, Ice" signs that are erected in January are usually still warning of Arctic conditions the following September.
On Sunday, the rains came, and the water formed in pools across the N7; I encountered three multi-car crashes within a couple of miles, all apparently caused by cars aquaplaning on lakes on newly constructed, badly drained roads. And on the slip road into Kill there is another sign of the heroic works and visions of the great DUPFA that is the NRA: an oasis of food, fuel and toilets.
Actually, the Topaz service station at Kill is not a proper motorway service station: it merely functions as one, though traffic heading north has no easy access to it, and traffic heading south has to leave the N7 completely to enter it. But at least it is visible from the N7. No other petrol station is visible for the 140 miles or so to Cork or Limerick.
The station is too small to have a proper lorry park, but it has toilets and a restaurant, so drivers park their lorries on the slip road into Kill, often causing congestion and visibility problems, and so considerably increasing the hazards to all road users. But lorry drivers legally have to stop. Yet throughout the entire network of roads that the NRA has constructed, there are no service stations -- no toilets, no fuel and no proper lorry parks.
So the roads from the Border to Galway, Limerick or Cork, involving journeys of some 250 miles or more, are without services of any kind. You have to leave the motorway system completely if you want refreshment or a toilet break or fuel. Needless to say, finding an off-motorway petrol station usually requires an intimate knowledge of the area because, though there might (just possibly) be signs on the motorway that petrol is available at the next exit, no further signs will then guide you to your destination. And, of course, these are old-fashioned petrol stations, not motorway service areas, and so there are no lorry parks with well-maintained toilets or even showers (as one finds in mainland Europe).
THE wizards of the NRA have apparently constructed small lorry parking bays near Urlingford and Mitchellstown, but these don't even have litter bins, and so are festooned with rubbish. The drivers then have to re-enter the M8 without proper slip-roads to ease their admission. A major collision is, therefore, sooner or later inevitable.
We were the last country in western Europe to build a modern national road network. So why did the NRA apparently learn almost NOTHING from the autobahn, autostrada, autoroute and motorway construction programmes of other countries? The NRA even began building motorways without median crash barriers, until the inevitable head-on collision obliged them to retrofit them (at huge extra cost) to the motorways it had just completed. Fifty years ago, Paddy in Britain was building one mile of motorway, complete with service stations, every eight days. Half a century on, that kind of achievement is apparently well beyond Paddy in Ireland.
We have taken two decades to construct motorways connecting Galway, Limerick, Dublin and Belfast, and without a single proper service station. Who knows which of these newly built roads is prone to puddling and aquaplaning, as the N7 is near Kill? And how many motorists have run out of fuel, not merely because there were no service stations on the motorways, but also because the almost impossible-to-find off-motorway service stations had closed at night?
But the most mysterious feature about the abysmal dysfunctionalism of the NRA is not the extraordinary hubris it exhibits (a characteristic of all DUPFAs: witness FAS), but the mute docility of the taxpayers in the face of such extravagant and grotesque ineptitude.
