Three Billboards my arse….

We are surrounded by advertising these days. It’s on the TV, on the radio, on our newspapers, on our phones and our laptops. It’s all around us, it’s impossible to avoid and not all of it is good.

When we’re driving, we can see it on billboards and on abandoned artic trailers propped up in farmers’ fields, positioned strategically so you can’t miss them.

If you haven’t noticed it before, then have a look the next time you’re out and about. See how many trailers you can spot languishing among the turnips, with messages stuck to the side of them. There’s no shortage of companies telling us what to wear, what to eat and where to eat it.

The trailers are in fields because it’s difficult for advertisers to get planning permission to erect advertising signs on the public roadway, but you don’t need permission to advertise from a field.

OK, so they’re not illegal, but they can be a distraction. They are designed to catch your attention at a time when you should be concentrating on the road, so there should be some form of regulation on them. I think they’re unsightly and a blight on the countryside and in many cases, they are nothing more than oversized litter.

Many of them are just rusted heaps, held together with bailing twine and sticky tape with torn posters peeling off them and I wonder if they are even an effective advertising tool?

Signage on the side of the road is regulated for a reason but you can always trust the Irish to find a way out of a legal requirement. The first thing we tend to do when we encounter a legal deterrent is to look for a loophole to beat it.

The fact that the legislation may have been created for our health and wellbeing, and possibly to save our lives, is neither here nor there. We will do our best to defeat it.

I heard a discussion on the radio about the new roadside drug testing equipment that was introduced here not so long ago. Drivers can now be tested to determine if they have drugs in their system. It stands to reason that we would all be safer on the road if people, doped up to their eyeballs on cannabis or cocaine, were not sitting behind the wheel of a car.

It’s a simple saliva test and from that they can tell the type of drug and the quantity present in the drivers’ system. The idea is to make the roads safer for all road users, which is surely a good idea. But not everyone sees it that way.

A professor explained how the machine works and he suggested that it should deter drivers from getting behind the wheel of a car if they are under the influence of drugs.

The first caller to the radio show wanted to know how many cannabis cigarettes he could smoke before he would be caught for drug driving. So, instead of looking at the benefits of this new technology, he immediately wanted to know what he could get away with.

That’s kind of missing the point but it seems to be our default position. When someone tells us that we can’t do something, it just makes us more determined to do it anyway. My father always said that the best way to make something popular in Ireland was to ban it.

When smoking was first banned in pubs in Ireland, it was met with fierce opposition. It was a health initiative designed to make the air cleaner and safer for us all to breathe so that our health would be better protected. This was something that we would all benefit from it in the long run, so you would imagine that it would have been well received. Not so, and there were plenty who didn’t like it.

They claimed it was an infringement of their human rights and they demanded the right to fill their lungs with toxic fumes. Nobody was going to prevent them from getting cancer and having yellow teeth as long as they had a breath left in their bodies. Albeit a bad one.

Anyone who wanted to interfere with their right to get sick would have to do it over their dead bodies, which was a distinct possibility.

This decision was going to spell the end of pub life in Ireland. Customers wouldn’t be able to cope if they couldn’t have a fag in one hand and a pint in the other.

But smokers were eventually forced to go outside. Initially, some tested this to the limit by standing just inside the front door with one foot or a finger outside. Smoking rooms were invented that often defied logic. Restaurants had smoking and no smoking sections even though in some cases, they were all in the same room under the one ceiling.

But eventually we settled down and grudgingly realised that this ban wasn’t such a bad thing after all. The air was cleaner, our clothes didn’t stink after a night out and the décor wasn’t stained anymore. You could eat your meal without having to search for it in a cloud of smoke coming from the guy at the next table.

So, we were happy again and we wondered what all the fuss was about in the first place. So, maybe the fact that it took us so long to come to our senses has more to do with how we sell the message than the actual content of the message itself. It could be that advertising is the real issue here and to be honest, some of it is pure rubbish.

Literally, and in many cases, it’s just sitting in a field scaring the cattle and annoying the motorists.