Poor truckers. As if they haven't enough to contend with on the roads, now they're running the gauntlet of snipers.
Consider it: There you are, tootling along at two in the morning, doing whatever it is truckers do - leafing through the Argos catalogue, knitting yourself a nice pair of tights or discussing Aristotelian ethics with a fellow road warrior on the radio - when all of a sudden you've been shot in the neck. Boom! Just like that.
You pull over into the hard shoulder. Shocked wouldn't be the word for it.. "What in the name of all the prostrates itself before the Great Trucker in the Sky is the world coming to?" you'd be thinking.
Which is exactly what I thought when I heard of the poor fella for whom that very scenario materialised on the M50 last week.
For an instant, I suspected paramilitary involvement, imagined that maybe the IRA had seen what a profitable racket the M50 was turning out to be for a certain toll company and decided they wanted a cut of the action. Perhaps our trucker pal had skipped through a turnpike taxation point somewhere between the Ballymount exit and the Red Cow roundabout and been picked off for his troubles? Stranger things have happened.
But no. Neither claim of responsibility nor offer to execute the trigger-happy freedom fighter was forthcoming from a certain P O'Neill. (There was a time, not so long ago, when an IRA statement was a rare, mysterious thing. Now they're so common I'm shortly expecting a detailed description of what the North Belfast brigade have for their dinner before going out for a night of punishment beating.) So that possibility was discounted.
Perhaps it was agents sent by the NRA or the Department of Transport to target uppity truckers, warning them to back off from their incessant demands for tunnels and tax incentives and fuel price cuts and the like? A tempting conclusion for a paranoid conspiracy theorist like myself, but perhaps a bit of a leap too far.
What if, I thought, it was some disgruntled bloke driven stir crazy by the M50 and the truckers who have blocked him in for interminable hours when all he wants to do is get home in time for Corrie? Clondalkin's own Lee Harvey Oswald, up there on his grassy knoll, from whence he is exacting vengeance on all his tormentors?
Maybe he was emulating the Washington snipers who killed 10 people in October 2002, only to be caught by - a trucker? Hmm . . . Again, attractive but implausible.
The sad reality is that it was probably some teenage thug with a rifle and sub-human intelligence taking potshots at innocent road users just for the bleedin' buzz, like.
Apparently, there has been a whole raft of incidents in the area recently where rocks and other objects have been turfed over bridges onto oncoming traffic, not to mention other pellet-gun attacks.
So how to stop it? Never fear - I have a cunning plan. Have you ever heard of schemes where joyriders are given old jalopies to race against each other? Apparently, it keeps the poor lambs busy and purges them of the insatiable urge to nick cars.
What about a similar solution for the M50 attackers? They could be tempted out from hiding with promises of free assault rifles. They would then be locked in a warehouse, whereupon they are free to shoot each other to their hearts' content. Deadly or wha'?
The last one standing - although he won't know this beforehand - will have the honour of being the first person in Irish history publicly executed via a wedgie administered by a big ignorant trucker from Offaly.
You think that's rough justice? Just wait until I'm Emperor of the Universe. Just you wait.
