Attempts to drive straight through Dublin city centre may remind them of trying to find the exit in a casino . . . a labyrinth of blind alleys and misdirection to keep you in town as long as possible. Without a roulette wheel or pretty women bringing you free drinks.

With luck, the visiting punters will escape the very real carnage on our roads, where a combination of heroic drinking and a culture of lawlessness will have undoubtedly toted up a big butcher's bill for Patrick's feast.

I remember being a visitor here and not knowing what to make of these strange inefficiencies, charming though some of them might be. What was this "social partnership" business, for example? Only in a place where politics had ceased to bear any relation to reality could you resurrect an exotic Catholic social theory from the 1920s and tell yourself it's the real basis of your capitalist economic success. If it made people feel good to believe that, and preserved the underlying social order while letting people get on with their lives, well what was the harm?

This week it occurred to me that there might be quite a bit of harm indeed. You could say that social partnership is killing people, actually.

It's been a while since I counted myself a visitor. I even had to give up my treasured New York State driving licence and apply for the local variety.

Thanks to another quaint tradition here that honours the Duke of Wellington's decision to put his supply train on the left side of the road at Waterloo, this meant that I couldn't merely count my 16 years' driving experience and get an Irish licence.

So after passing my driving theory test, I received a letter dated 2 September 2005 from the head of the Driver Testing Section of the Department of Transport, in Ballina, Co Mayo, acknowledging receipt of my application for a driving test. It is the last correspondence I have received on the subject. Now I'm in a queue for a road test with 130,000 people in front of me, which is slightly longer than your average M50 tailback.

Not that I'm allowed to know what an M50 tailback looks like, of course. After all, I'm a provisional driver, so without a fully-licensed driver with me, I'm not allowed to drive on a motorway. Never mind that my chances of being in an accident on the M50 in rush hour are several orders of magnitude less than the odds of buying it this weekend whilst whipping round the back roads near beautiful Ballina as her pubs empty of revellers.

And as we all know, everyone is scrupulous in following these regulations. The fact that the economy still functions is a miracle, what with 25% of the workforce asking their mum to sit in the passenger seat while they drive to work. Of course, the gardai know this, too. And if they were to actually enforce the law on provisional drivers, the country would grind to a halt and there would be less need to get to jobs at companies that have closed.

Lately, of course, the public and politicians have pronounced themselves shocked . . . shocked! . . . that there might be a relationship between 400 road deaths a year and such a high proportion of drivers who aren't properly qualified.

At long last, someone in government called this situation the farce it is and attempted to actually do something about it.

Can't move that many drivers through the existing system?

Bring in the private sector and sort out the backlog.

This brought one quaint inefficiency . . . a lackadaisical attitude towards driving and law enforcement . . . into conflict with another: the fantasy that social partnership is about "progress".

So this week, an arbitration panel ruled that the monopoly of unionised driving testers had to be maintained, under "sustaining progress, " at literally any cost. Including preventing the elected government of Ireland from fulfilling its responsibility to take the necessary steps to save lives on our roads.

This is perhaps one quaint notion of "sustaining progress" we could live without.