Bernard O'Shea: Why are there so many roundabouts in Ireland?

Back on the road last week, I was driving through the outskirts of Longford town. I practically had vertigo by the time I had bypassed it. 

Similar to my own county town of Portlaoise. I used to joke that Portlaoise translated from the Irish, means “Place of a thousand roundabouts.” Then a trend emerged last week. 

Driving through Carlow, I was greeted with banks of them. But it's not a midland phenomenon. Dundalk is a town I know intimately, as my time spent there as a student has its fair share of them too.

I asked my friend, an engineer (I did), and they told me that, “It’s a very effective traffic calming measure”. I pushed them a bit.

“So you mean they're cheap?” 

“No”, they replied. “They're just effective.” 

If I were producing a Netflix documentary, I’d push them and eventually uncover a devious plot involving scrupulous developers, and “big tech” or “big pharma” or “big something” was involved, and we innocent road users were all duped. But I’m not happy with something being just “effective”.

You might think that roundabouts have no fundamental importance in your life (and I’m imagining my editor reading this now thinking the same thing, too). 

For most people, they are only a cumbersome, often aggravating part of travel. But the entire country is littered with them. 

Where once ring forts dominated the landscape, there are now roundabouts. 

If you look at Newgrange, you could ponder whether it was Ireland’s first roundabout. 

Were our neolithic ancestors foretelling our strategic road-building plans? 

Was a druid standing there on the longest day of the year thousands of years ago, shouting at his flock why they put the garden on the roof? 

“How are we supposed to get the ride-on lawnmower up there?” 

I have a theory that small towns desperately wanted roundabouts in the 1980s so they could use them to put beautiful flower arrangements in them for the Tidy Towns competition, spelling out the name of their village to gain extra points to finish ahead of their neighbours. 

Or, was it a ploy by our artistic community to develop more public spaces for their creative endeavours? 

The Nass ball, for instance, is probably the second most famous ball in Ireland after the ball that Ray Houghton put in the English net in Euro 88.

It could be said that Ireland came out of the shadows of inferiority and displayed the first significant display of Irish confidence at a roundabout.

The Walkinstown Roundabout in Dublin became a focal point for celebrating our win against Romania in Italia 90. It was so memorable that it’s still replayed consistently on RTÉ. 

Lads with moustaches roaring out of Datsuns “Ole Ole Ole” on the most challenging drivers-licence-test-failing roundabout in western Europe. 

There also used to be a house in the middle of the Walkinstown Roundabout. That is not a joke. 

A man named 'Chicken' Cullen lived in a house with his sister Dolly. He refused to sell his home to Dublin Corporation. In 1950 the Corporation went ahead and built the roundabout around the house. Only 21 years later, he moved to a house built for him across the road.

How many people spent years in traffic at the Red Cow roundabout in Dublin? How many Nobel Peace Prizes or ingenious inventions did the nation miss out on because those people were sitting in their cars demented, banging the steering wheel, and screaming internally, “I should have waited until the traffic died down”.

Not to be outdone by Dublin having two of the most iconic roundabouts in Ireland, Cork had to up its game to claim the largest one in the country, the Kinsale Road Roundabout. It’s even got its flyover so take that, Dublin.

Then there is the job of naming seven million of them. 

The roundabout in Portlaoise is named after Irish Revolutionary James Fintan Lalor. The roundabouts in Longford are named after literary figures Oliver Goldsmith and Maria Edgworth. I know Marty Morrisey is fuming that they haven’t called one after him in Ennis yet.

So, to sum up, why are there so many roundabouts in Ireland? I think it’s because we as a nation needed our moon landing. 

We needed to show the world that we could create an engineering feat akin to China's great wall, and we did that. 

From what I can see, we were the first and the only county in the world to put traffic lights on roundabouts. 

When you think traffic management can’t get any more problematic, we broke all the rules and made a simple left turn as complicated as The Riemann Hypothesis or the last days of Winning Streak.

As for the town (not the city) with the most roundabouts? For me, it has to be Navan. 

If there are any Navatonians out there who think I’m right, let us gather and celebrate it. 

As we close in on Samhain and Halloween (a genuinely global Irish celebration), we can observe something that we have too made very Irish.

So the next time you are in the outside lane trying to take the third turn but are forced to keep going around until someone lets you in or take the wrong exit and go to Athboy instead of Athlone, remember you are experiencing Irish heritage at its best.