Madam, - Your columnist has kindly vacated his normal space to allow me to dispose of the preposterous notion from the Minister - a Mister Brennan, I believe - that I should be raised on stilts when I finally reach the Red Cow Roundabout. Madam, I am a tram, writes Kevin Myers.
Nuns do not walk the high wire. Popes - unless they were once bishops of Galway - do not go to lap-dancing clubs. And trams do not go on stilts.
That is in our nature. We cannot help it. That we are - idiotically - being treated as non-trams, and being made to rush out from the centre of Dublin to the distant Red Cow Roundabout like some vulgar rapid transit system, doesn't diminish our essential tramness. I know whereof I speak, for I come from a along line of trams. And trams are trams, Madam - not buses, not trains, not undergrounds, not charabancs.
To be sure, we are not "exclusive" in any snobbish sense about our identity. For example, our feelings about trains are cousinly. We would not actually engage in what you might call love-making, but we have been known to flirt, if you take my meaning. But as for buses, oh we loathe them. Always have. Promiscuous little hussies that go anywhere at any time. I have seen buses up country lanes, Madam, touting for business, their doors wide open for all to see within. Shocking but true. I trust I have not offended your delicate sensibilities.
Buses and trams are long since sworn enemies, and the history of transport is littered with accounts of the bloody battles between track and tyre. There was the famous Bradford & Bingley bus-tram war; the Inchicore & Clondalkin conflict, of tragic memory; the appalling massacre of Tramco, in which an entire section of McTramalds was butchered and damned by the treacherous Campbuses. And each November we gather to remember and honour those who have lost their grooves in the cause of tramdom.
The last post is sounded; electric arms are lowered; tracks weep; and the senior tram present intones: "They shall not grow mould as we that are left grow mould. . ." In other words, Madam, we have our history and our sense of pride. And now we hear that Minister Brennan wishes us to clamber up stilts, and allow all and sundry see our underneaths. Madam, not even my husband has seen my underneath, and I have allowed my doctor to make his inspections there only through sheets, and in the presence of a lady tram of the Reformed Faith, with her electrical arm upraised lest he try to take liberties. The modern tram might wear the raiments of the 21st century, but in our hearts, we remain true to our Victorian origins. Unlike that good-time trollop the bus, all bench-seat and no suspension.
Yet we hear this Minister is so deluded with lust that we wishes to raise not one of us, but all of us - and many of us are unmarried ladies, our bogeys still untouched by oilcan - up in the air, so that he may gaze Where No Gentleman Should Ever Set His Eyes. One has to ask: what other indignities of an intimate variety has he in mind for us? I can assure him now, he is getting nowhere near my grooved underparts at the strangely named Red Cow Roundabout.
This intersection is the primary interchange between Limerick and Cork, Dublin, Dublin Airport, the north-eastern and the north-western seaboards and the Dun Laoghaire ferry port. When I first heard this, I assumed that the Red Cow Roundabout was a vastly complex traffic system, like Spaghetti Junction outside Birmingham.
However, because the agency responsible for "masterminding" - and what pleasure that term gives me - the Red Cow Roundabout scheme bought me ages before I would possibly be used, I have had the time to give much thought to the subject of the Red Cow Garage. Why I was bought and paid for fully two years before I was earning any money? And why has Ireland made its prime national route less like Spaghetti Junction and more like macaroni cheese out of a tin?
Madam, it seems that this country has finally managed to create a 21st-century version of the West Clare Railway - and this at the height of your boom. It is of course your right to squander your riches as you may. But if you think your Minister is using this ineptitude as an excuse to get his grubby fingers on my armature brush, or to try stroking my step-down transformer while I am trying to rise above the Cork-Dublin, Belfast-Munster, Dun Laoghaire-Dublin Airport and Donegal-Wexford traffic, he has another think coming.
The stilts will protect me against such outrages, you may say. Madam, I know men. Once one has seen my underneath, there'll be no stopping him, the little pervert. He'll have ministerial ladders against the stilts, and in no time at all he'll be waving me down, wearing one of those big raincoats that his type go in for. And the moment I stop, he'll clamber aboard, his raincoat wide open, a big rapacious grin on his face as he. . .no, no, I cannot go on.
Madam, I appeal to you. Stop this obscenity now. Far from taking us out to the Red Cow Roundabout, the Minister should be turning most of us around in the centre of Dublin. The reason he isn't is because he has an unhealthy interest in my bottom.
Yours, et cetera, Luas Lane.