EMISSIONS: The current commuting series in The Irish Times has thrown up some startling facts. I never realised Ireland is the most car-dependent country on Earth. Nor that Dublin will, by 2010, be the same size as Los Angeles with a quarter of the population.
Welcome to the Commuterdome. What makes this harder to digest is that we're doing it on a creaking road system that can't cope. It's flabbergasting that a country which could have carpeted itself in Yankee dollars a few years ago can have such a pitiful infrastructure. Try driving from Dublin to Limerick, Mullingar or Drogheda on a Friday evening - you'd be quicker painting yourself luminous yellow and crawling along the hard shoulder on hands and knees.
Apparently, the average Irish car is driven 70 per cent further each year than its French or German equivalent and 50 per cent more than the British. Even the Americans, most of whom wouldn't think twice about driving to the fridge for another can of lard, use their cars a third less.
So, unless there is a fleet of cars owned by an amphetamine-fuelled gang of auto fetishists who drive them around in circles 24 hours a day, bumping up the national average, the statistic means one thing - we spend far too much time stuck looking at someone else's rear windscreen, listening to halfwit radio jocks and plotting merciless armed vengeance. (Or is that last bit just me?) And why is this? Two reasons. First, the traffic: too many cars, too little space. And secondly, housing: too many people, too little space to put them in.
In fairness, that second bit isn't strictly true - Ireland is one of the most underpopulated countries in Europe. The problem lies in the fact that a third of that population live within 50 miles of each other. And they all demand their own bit of space.
What is it about the Irish and our obsession with owning a patch of land? Is it a deep-rooted psychological fear centred in inherited Famine-era dispossession trauma? Or simply petty bourgeoisie?
Whatever it is, it results in almost exclusively horizontal rather than vertical building in Dublin, resulting in the city spreading outwards, infiltrating its hinterland like a malignant cancer. Pointy metal pole notwithstanding, no other major city in Europe is so flat.
Surely the nouveau riche snobs in the city could be convinced to live in high-rise blocks - wouldn't it give them a better angle to look down their noses at people? Otherwise, Leinster is destined to become a housing estate filled with people forced to make the insane commute each day.
Five hours in a car each day just to spend eight hours in a job you hate so you can afford a decent home for your family? There's got to be more to life than that.
But it's not just the slaves commuting to Dublin that are stuck with the motorised option. The better half and I were in Co Clare recently, where the necessity of being motorised was starkly apparent. Without a car, you're trapped. Try explaining to a pair of Italian teenagers with zero English, that the next bus from Doolin to Shannon airport is in seven hours . . . short of standing naked on the side of the road with their thumbs out, their only chance of making their flight is to take a taxi.
While driving home through Dublin 29 (aka Co Westmeath) on a Tuesday afternoon and hitting a 34-mile tailback, the acquisition of a wee cottage in the west and a battered pick-up truck to park in the driveway seemed all the more enticing. I could sit there smugly and be grateful that I'm not in some faux-Georgian three-bed semi in Dublin 62 (formerly known as north Wexford), honing my jackeen accent so I'll be understood in the local boozer.
