This column has, in its own reticent, understated way, been critical enough of the National Roads Authority. The NRA has often displayed the sign-making talents of a chimpanzee at a typewriter trying to prove that sooner or later it will produce Hamlet; but not just yet.
And of those many observations about the NRA - all minor masterpieces of restraint - I don't remember when I first complained about the sign at the M 50 which offers the options of North or South, without telling you what destinations lay in either direction: but I do know it's a long time ago.
Well, the sign's still there. Now it would be presumptuous to think that anyone in the NRA reads this column; indeed, it would be presumptuous to think that they read anything at all. But surely I can't be the only person around who finds such a sign absolutely worthless to the uninitiated. Perhaps the NRA specialises in erecting signs for People Who Don't Need Them; and Drivers Who Do Need Them deserve to get lost, the imbeciles.
To be sure, not all the NRA signs are for People Who Don't Need Them. I recently visited the splendid An Glór gallery in Ennis, and I never once managed to get lost on my way there. Indeed, it was almost disappointing; signs for Ennis were not the prelude to a little diversion through Belmullet or Mullingar. When I was promised that the road ahead would take me to Limerick, that's indeed where I ended up. You always know when you've arrived in that fair city; wayside executions, cars burning merrily, gunfights across the Shannon, as the local gardai attended to the really pressing work at - as we say - hand: closing down the city's massage parlours.
And the new NRA road between Limerick and Ennis is a fine affair, on which it is almost impossible to keep below the speed limit of - I think - 50 m.p.h.. A local told me he had been twice done for speeding in a single week.
One more offence and his insurance company will take a JCB and start to shovel doubloons from his account into theirs.
Needless to say, he was delighted that gardai had been so vigilantly enforcing speed limits on a stretch of dual carriageway where it's easier to drive at 75 m.p.h. than at 50 m.p.h.. But of course, our law officers have little else to do in the south-west.
However, that's not the point of this diary, which is gradually working itself up to being really enthusiastic about something the NRA has done. It takes time to do this, rather like getting into a cold shower in midwinter, when the water cascading from the shower head is a fraction above freezing, and there are about 100 feet of cold water in the pipe before the hot water finally arrives.
So in I step. The NRA's Boyne Valley Bridge on the M1 is a true engineering masterpiece, the most brilliant modern construction in Ireland. It is sumptuously beautiful, both in daytime when one can admire its superb cable-strung construction, before, dazzled by its beauty, one drives headlong into the Boyne: or at night-time, when it becomes a festival of fibre-optic illumination, standing like a vast amusement arcade, so that for miles one wonders what the glorious spectacle ahead might be.
I am not usually in favour of light-pollution in the middle of the countryside, but I make an exception of the Boyne bridge I don't know who designed it, but the supervising engineer was a John Iliff. It is actually worth making a trip to see it; better still, take a foreigner there. I doubt if a more imaginatively beautiful, functionally effective construction has been erected recently anywhere in Europe. It stands as irrefutable proof that there are people in the NRA of vision, taste, pragmatism and discernment.
So where were they when the M1 was being designed in its full length? You can now drive from the M50-M1 junction outside Dublin all the way to the Border without meeting a single service station. To be sure, you can leave the motorway and go hunting the little backroads looking for petrol; but actually on the motorway itself, there are no service stations, no restaurants, no toilets, no resting places.
The same is true of the orbital, serviceless M50. Thus drivers fleeing from The Siege of Limerick to the peace of Belfast will meet their last service station at Kill on the Naas dual carriageway. The next services are on the far side of the Border, 100 miles away.
This is worse than scandalous. Has the NRA not heard of motorway service areas, all-night or otherwise? Did it even think about planning for them?
Did it consider for a moment that here was a very good way indeed of enhancing safety, giving drivers somewhere to rest and drink coffee, as meanwhile the NRA makes some money from them? But perhaps it is above such mundane considerations.
So how many motorists have run out of petrol because there are no petrol stations for about 100 miles? How many terrified women have been stranded at night like this? How many drivers have fallen - or will fall - asleep at the wheel because there's nowhere to stop for a nap or a meal? And does the NRA even care? Who knows? But I do know that meaningless, fatuous North-South sign on the M 50 is still there; and will be in five years' time.