Circles of fear

With your welfare in mind, dear people, I took a trip around the new Red Cow interchange last week. Tho' riddled with fear, I delved into the belly of the beast, and soon found myself looking down a tunnel to the depths of the earth. This can't be right - I thought I'd be on an empty motorway, instead of being surrounded by abandoned JCBs. Lost already.

I then realised I was surrounded by a number of concentric circles, each more abhorrent than the next. I had trundled into the Nine Circles of Hell from Dante's Divine Comedy. There was nothing funny about it. I panicked like a hippo in a lift. I tore around in circles until I calmed enough to make out the geography of this Paradise of Pain.

The First Circle, or limbo - is where the poor souls of lost tourists, addled commuters and the generally bewildered are stuck in an endless loop between the Red Cow and Ballymount junctions. They are largely innocents, victims of circumstance and other people's incompetence. Their spirits flag further with each second. Ebbing, flowing, drifting into nothingness.

The Second Circle is for those overcome by lust - mostly slack-jawed halfwits who've crashed their Almeras into barriers while ogling Aston Martins. The Third, the demesne of the gluttons (ie SUV drivers). They have been ripped from their egowagons "to lie in the mud under continual cold rain and hail". Their torture is magnified by the irony that this is the only time in their lives they will actually need four-wheel-drive.

The Fourth is reserved for those "whose concern for material goods deviated from the desired mean". The avaricious and the squanderers. The 2008 numberplates are a giveaway. In the Fifth Circle are those "that anger overcame". Road-ragers and boyracers, left to fight it out for all eternity. It's carnage in there.

In the Sixth are the heretics, deluded lycra-clad unbelievers who tried to pedal their bikes through the maelstrom of motorised madness. In the Seventh - the violent, many of them Bulgarian truckers playing lorry polo, using a hairdresser's Mini for a ball. In the Eighth Circle there are Nine Evil Ditches, dug after someone - thinking the stains left by an engineer's coffee mug were design features - misread the plans.

In the Sixth Evil Ditch are the hypocrites. Weighted down by leaden cloaks, they trudge eternally on a narrow track. Like Dante's hypocrites, their "outward appearance shines brightly and passes for holiness, but under that show lies the terrible weight of his deceit which the soul must bear through all eternity". Here are the drivers of hybrid SUVs, conning nobody but themselves. And snide fingerpointing ecowarriors in fume-belching classic cars. That's me, said I, driving in.

In the Ninth Circle are traitors and frauds, shysters and sleeveens, the connivers and the corrupt, those responsible for the whole mess in the first place. I'll not name names - that's what tribunals are for. At last I escaped the ditch and steered into the Purgatory that is the Luas Park and Ride. A banner blew in the foul putrid air above me. "Abandon Your Vehicles, All Ye Who Enter Here" it read. Ever the rule-abider, I did. For all I know, my car's still there. My conclusions? Enter at your own peril.