A road sign has one job. Tell you something useful. The distance to the next town. The speed limit. Which direction the road bends. Simple stuff.

Ireland's road signs try their best. They really do. But somewhere between the planning stage and the lad with the post-hole digger, things go wrong. Spectacularly, beautifully, hilariously wrong.

Here are twelve of the finest examples.

1. The Killaloe Paradox. Two signs. Same road. Both pointing to Killaloe. Two completely different distances. One says you're nearly there. The other says you've a while yet. Schrodinger's town: simultaneously near and far until you actually arrive.

2. The Sign That Defies Classification. Funny shape. Baffling content. A message that reads like it was written by a committee, edited by a different committee, and approved by someone who'd already gone home. You look at it. You look at it again. You still don't know what it wants.

3. The Death Sentence. A warning about water and electricity. Fair enough. Important safety information. Except the wording reads less like a cautionary notice and more like a threat. Not "be careful." More "you will die." Subtle difference in tone there.

4. The World's Shortest Diversion. Diversions usually send you on a twenty-minute detour through three villages you've never heard of. This one sends you approximately four metres to the left. The sign probably took longer to install than the diversion takes to drive.

5. The Road for Nobody. No cars allowed. No pedestrians allowed. So the question becomes: who exactly is this road for? Ghosts? Cyclists? Particularly ambitious badgers? The sign doesn't say. It just prohibits everyone and leaves you to figure it out.

6. Two Signs, One Location, Two Opinions. Standing side by side, these signs manage to convey the same information in two contradictory ways. It's like getting directions from two people at the same time, one saying left and the other saying right. Pick a sign. Commit.

7. The Keep Right, Bend Left Situation. A sign says keep right. The sign next to it says the road bends left. Both are in the same spot. Your brain short-circuits for a moment before you realise the "keep right" sign is actually pointing to a farm entrance off the main road. Context matters. Placement, apparently, does not.

8. The Pedestrian Water Crossing. A sign that appears to direct pedestrians across a body of water. No bridge indicated. No boat. Just a sign pointing firmly into the wet. The miracle of walking on water, brought to you by your local county council.

9. The Speed Limit to Nowhere. A speed limit sign planted on a road that's barely a road. More of a dirt track, really. The kind of surface where ten kilometres an hour would feel reckless. And yet there's the sign, stern as anything, insisting on a limit that the terrain makes physically impossible to reach.

10. The Sign Talking to a Bush. Road signs are designed to face traffic. This one faces a hedge. Whatever vital information it contains is being delivered exclusively to the local shrubbery. The motorists it was meant for drive past oblivious. The bush, presumably, is well informed.

11. The Staircase Situation. Road signs (including a no-cycling sign) mounted at a location that is, structurally, a set of stairs. Who was planning to cycle down a staircase? Who was going to drive a car up one? The signs exist to prevent a scenario that physics had already ruled out.

12. Caution: Sheep Lying Down. Not sheep crossing the road. Not sheep near the road. Sheep lying on the road. Flat out. Having a rest. And honestly, if you've driven any rural road in the west of Ireland, you know this sign isn't funny at all. It's a documentary.

Ireland's road signs do their job, mostly. But the ones that don't are a national treasure. Contradictory, baffling, placed in locations that defy logic, and occasionally directing you into a lake.

They're not going anywhere. Neither, presumably, are the sheep.