The roadside ballet that once was hitchhiking
There was a time when the extended thumb was Ireland's most eloquent digit. A silent semaphore that spoke volumes about trust, community, and the casual choreography of our national transportation. Now, like Latin, it's a dead language. I passed through the Midlands last week, a three-hour drive from Dublin, and saw not a single hitchhiker. The roadside species has gone extinct with barely a requiem.
Once, you'd see them gathered like migratory birds at the edges of towns - students with rucksacks, old men with cloth caps, women clutching shopping bags - all performing the ancient ritual of thumbing a lift. Their absence feels like something fundamental has shifted in our national character, something beyond mere logistics.
Hitchhiking was always more than transportation. It was Ireland's informal confessional box, a rolling counselling service, and, occasionally, a mobile debating chamber. The car - that most private of spaces - transformed into something gloriously public when you rescued a stranger. Drivers would divulge secrets to hitchhikers they'd never tell their spouses, priests, or therapists. A journey from Mayo to Dublin could include three different life stories, political manifestos, and, occasionally, uninvited attempts to save your immortal soul.
I first hitchhiked as a university student in the early '80s, when being broke was still considered character-building rather than a societal failure. My most memorable voyage was from Portmarnock to Dublin city centre, already late for lectures, standing at the roadside and a hopeful thumb pressed into the vision of city-bound traffic. I was eventually rescued by a small white meat delivery truck whose driver apparently mistook my scholarly desperation for an interest in his profession. I spent the next hour in what can only be described as a mobile abattoir - a vehicular Hades where the spirits of recently departed livestock permeated the air. The interior temperature, amplified by the summer heat, had turned the cargo area into a kind of bovine sauna.
The driver, a philosopher-butcher in a blood-spattered apron, cheerfully discussed Irish politics while I developed a breathing technique that involved inhaling at a dangerously reduced rate and exhaling through my mouth only when speaking. This resulted in a conversational style reminiscent of a man simultaneously drowning and delivering a stilted sermon. By the journey's end, I'd understood why vegetarianism might be a spiritually superior path. I arrived at college smelling like I'd wrestled in an offal pit.
Irish hitchhiking had its own peculiar social contract. The driver offered transport; the hitchhiker provided conversation. Silence was considered poor payment for petrol. On longer journeys, this verbal commerce could become exhausting. I once talked non-stop from Longford to Ballina about fishing - a subject I then knew nothing about - with a man who seemed to have catalogued every trout in the Shannon. By the journey's end, my tongue felt as if it had been filleted.
The only thing more linguistically taxing was attempting conversation with a foreign driver armed with fractured English, the vocabulary consisting primarily of 'yes,' 'no', and enthusiastic but incomprehensible phrases that might be about the weather or nuclear physics, it was often impossible to tell.
Women hitchhikers had different calculations to make, balancing risk against mobility in ways men rarely considered. Across Ireland's winding roads, they perfected a parallel art form - not just the securing of transport but the curation of it. Where men waved a thumb like a lazy auction bid, women conducted forensic character assessments in the seconds between a car slowing and a window rolling down.
This roadside ritual included a choreography invisible to male hitchhikers: ignoring the front passenger door swung open invitingly - that maw of red velvet danger - and sliding into the back seat instead with the regal self-possession of the Queen entering a state limousine. There was the strategic mention of a boyfriend waiting at the destination (always a Garda or professional rugby player), the careful sizing up of a driver's wedding ring, dashboard saints, or the telling debris of family life scattered across seats.
The Irish female hitchhiker became adept at spotting the subtle difference between the benign untidiness of a family car and the sinister cleanliness of a vehicle possibly valeted of evidence. Women hitchhikers perfected the art of appearing simultaneously fascinating and utterly unavailable, like the glass-encased exhibits in the National Museum.
Continental European hitchhiking had its own distinct flavours. The French treated it as an opportunity for national boasting - no mountain view went unremarked upon, no regional cheese unpraised. Germans required your destination before they'd unlock the door, as though fearing they might accidentally drive you to Poland. The Spanish rarely stopped but compensated with theatrical apologetic gestures as they sped by.
So, what killed this peculiarly intimate form of travel? The reflexive answer is fear, but I suspect that's too simplistic. We still trust strangers in myriad ways - we sleep in their spare rooms through Airbnb, we get into their cars through Uber. The difference is the corporate intermediary, the comforting illusion of vetting and accountability.
Perhaps it's also that we've lost the art of boredom. Long drives are no longer blank canvases needing human conversation to fill them. Drivers now have podcasts, audiobooks, and phone calls to occupy the journey. The hitchhiker's primary currency - companionship - has been devalued by digital alternatives.
Cheap airfares and improved public transport have played their part, too. A Ryanair flight from Knock to London often costs less than the fuel for the same journey. The once ubiquitous student hitchhiker has been replaced by students dragging wheeled suitcases through provincial airports.
But there's something more fundamental at work. Hitchhiking requires vulnerability - from both parties. The hitchhiker was physically exposed, dependent on the kindness of strangers. The driver was opening their private space to an unknown quantity. This mutual vulnerability created something that's become scarce: spontaneous human connection without algorithmic mediation.
That thumb-wielding figure at the roadside spoke volumes about who we were, not through words but through the simple acknowledgement that some journeys required help. The hitchhiker stood as living proof of our transportation system's gaping holes - and, more importantly, of our unspoken pact to mend them. No contracts signed, no money changing hands, just the quiet understanding that today's driver might be tomorrow's hitchhiker. Mayo farmers gave lifts to Dublin students who'd later pick up Belfast workers who'd then stop for Donegal fishermen. The cycle continued, unbroken, a kind of travel insurance paid not with premiums but with goodwill.
What we've gained in safety and convenience, we've lost in serendipity. The unexpected detours, both geographical and conversational, that came with hitchhiking are largely gone from modern travel. No app would ever suggest such a diversion.
Perhaps most significantly, hitchhiking represented faith in human goodness that now seems almost quaint. Each extended thumb was an act of optimism, a belief that strangers would stop, the journey would continue, and you would eventually arrive.
As we speed past the empty laybys and the roundabouts where hitchhikers once gathered, we might wonder what else has been engineered out of our landscape beyond these roadside wanderers. In our rush toward secure, predictable mobility, have we left behind something essential about trust, chance, and the pleasure of talking to strangers?
The thumb is now reserved for scrolling on phones rather than soliciting rides. The roadside ballet of hitchhiking has finished its final act. And while Ireland's roads are undoubtedly safer for it, they're also poorer in stories - the chance encounters, unexpected connections, and meandering conversations that once made a journey from Ballina to Dublin as much about the people you met as the places you passed.
