Driving in Ireland is Akin to Playing an Arcade Game

Ireland is a country of spell binding beauty.  Its people are deservedly  known for their friendliness and hospitality, but I’m convinced that a major reason its population is less than half what it was in 1840 is because of the invention of the automobile.

Most roads in Ireland are about the width of an average American driveway. For the most part, there are no shoulders and trees and telephone poles and other hard and unyielding objects closely border streets and roads. That makes for exciting driving when a speeding bus or truck approaches without slowing and misses your car by the width of a potato peal.

Driving in Ireland is akin to playing an arcade game in which one wins extra points for avoiding sheep, cattle, dogs and bicyclists when they unexpectedly pop up a few feet in front of your car’s radiator.

As many Americans who have spent their entire life right of center on two-way roads, as I gingerly steered the car around z-shaped turns I had to continually deny my instinct to cross to the other side of the road on blind curves.   I fervently wished that when Ireland won its freedom from England, it had showed its independence by moving over to the other side of the road. 

“Most drivers have the same experience when they get here,” said Mairead Bateman, whose inviting and peaceful bread and breakfast, Park House in Bunratty, is a 15 minute drive from the airport. “They are a bit shaken, but you’ll soon learn the ways of driving here.  Just go slow. Don’t worry about the drivers behind, just pull off the road and let them go by where there’s a place.”

I got similar advice from Tom Kelly, who has been driving a tour bus around the 112-mile postcard beautiful Ring of Kerry for 33 years without an accident even though the roads are narrow and mountainous, traffic is heavy in the tourist season and sheep frequently insist on their share of the highway.

Even though most were driving rented cars, the tourists on the bus had smartly opted to pay approximately 15 American dollars each for the relaxing day long tour rather than venture on nail-biting, unfamiliar roads.

The tours start from Kilarney and the buses pick up and drop off passengers at hotels or bed and breakfasts. In the summer,  similar tours run from Kilarney to travel the equally compellingly beautiful Dingle peninsula.

I looked on the tours as a way to survive another day on Irish roads. 

Did I tell you about road signs in Ireland?

Thank heaven, there are no highway billboards to mar the lovely scenery.  But there are signs, lots of signs, too many signs.  Some signs are helpful, some just bewilder a driver new to Ireland.

One of them is a white circle with a black slash through it.  It took me days to learn it wasn’t a command to slow down.  It means, surprisingly, that the 60 mile speed limit is allowed on that section of the road.

There are brown signs with white letters at every intersection pointing to hundreds of bed and breakfasts.  There are green signs with highway numbers and names of cities in yellow in both English and Gaelic, except for the Dingle peninsula.  At and beyond the tiny fishing village of Dingle, they are mostly in Gaelic.

The fact is there is too much information in too small letters for drivers to quickly discover where they are or learn where they are going. In cities and villages there is an opposite problem.  There are virtually no signs to tell tourists on what street they are traveling.

Recently, the Irish Hotel Federation warned that confusing road signs were driving tourists around the bend.  The organization’s president, Mary Fitzgerald, noted that 40 bodies of local governments were putting up road signs willy nilly, each having its own guidelines with no coordination with other counties.

“It’s difficult for Irish people depending on road signs, but tourists have to endure so much more.”  

There are also signs painted on the highway.  Many are helpful: “Slow,”  “More slowly” “Very Slowly.”  “Keep Left.”  “Traffic on the right has the right of way.”

But I clipped a telephone pole with the car’s side view mirror and banged over a high curb before learning that jagged white lines painted on the road mean that the traveling path has narrowed and one must edge closer to the center line.

One other piece of advice about driving in Ireland:  Paying the extra $10 to 20 daily for an automatic shift may be well worth the cost, even for those who learned to drive using a stick shift.

Our rented Renault not only had a reverse gear which which no sane driver could have found without divine guidance, but it had five forward gears.  The problem was there was no diagram to show  the location of the gears, so that finding the gear I was searching for when shifting was like pulling a lever on a slot machine and praying for the jackpot. It’s hard enough remembering to keep on the left and read confusing signs.  Driving a stick shift with unfamiliar gear locations can be serious trouble when you need a sudden burst of speed to avoid an oncoming bus coming at you from the side.

A couple of other things to know when renting a car in Ireland:  You must be at least 23 years of age and no older than 74.  Some rental agencies charge extra if the driver is 70 or older.

Of course, you may not want to drive at all.  Buses are cheap, run often and travel on virtually every paved road in the land.  And trains are the fastest way of traveling within a country that is about half the size of New York State.  Besides, they are a good way of meeting the native populace.

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