"There are a million `if onlys'. They make the nightmare that's there for you every morning when you wake up," says Killian.

"The most difficult thing about a fatal road traffic accident is that if only any one of a hundred things had been different, it would not have happened."

Killian, who does not want his surname used, was the driver in an accident which killed two of "the best buddies I had in the world", and paralysed a third. Twelve years on he has begun to come to some kind of peace with himself, having found a counsellor to steer him through the morass of guilt, anger and grief that lay beneath the "if onlys".

The now heavy-set man, his eyes moving between pain and brief smiles, was 19 in January 1986, living in a small town in the east of the country, his life "a great place to be".

He and three lads he had gone to school with - Matthew, Aonghus and Trevor - went out for a spin on the last Sunday of the month. They opted to go in Killian's car - he was an experienced driver, having driven around the family farm since the age of 12, and was, he concedes now, "reckless" in his command of the wheel.

At 7.30 p.m. traffic was making its way into town for evening Mass. Killian himself was rushing to pick up his girlfriend to take her to Mass. On a wide stretch of road entering the town, on the apex of a corner, his car hit a crooked man-hole cover; it swerved into oncoming traffic; his brakes, Killian discovered later, were faulty; he could not lose the speed; he swerved again to avoid the traffic, running into gravel, and on into a heavy steel railing.

Although a combination of several factors caused his car to spin into the railing, after several years of counselling he still sighs: "I was driving too fast. I was always driving too fast."

He was driving "about 50 miles per hour".

It was four days later that he came out of the coma, and two days after that that the doctor told him the crash had killed Matthew and Aonghus, that they had been buried on Wednesday and that Trevor was at the National Rehabilitation Centre in Dun Laoghaire, unlikely to ever walk again.

"He filled me full of sedatives and then told me this stuff. I was trying to experience this situation and I couldn't feel anything."

Despite a visit from Matthew's parents the day he came out of the coma and despite their telling him that they did not blame him, he believed, he says, that "whatever happened must have been down to me".

He went to see Trevor as soon as he got out of hospital, and again every day, though they hardly talked of the accident. "In the end he had his own issues to deal with and he turned around and told me to `feck off'."

Trevor had attempted to broach the subject, had told him "you know I don't blame you", but, says Killian. "I was unapproachable. It was like a tender wound and if anyone went to press it I'd jump back in terror."

He recounts his first visit to the graves. "I was there about three hours, kneeling at the graves, trying to feel some sort of emotion, and all the things I need to feel I couldn't. I was as green as they come, didn't know how to deal with it. No one knew how to support me. Everyone thought they were doing the best thing I suppose, not talking about it."

This imbued in him the further destructive sense that he had no right not to be able to cope. "I was in a house full of people (he has four brothers and five sisters) and on my own.

"The only nights I got to sleep were when I was drunk enough to sleep. If I was sober I would twist and turn in the bed, relive everything and maybe at about five or six fall into a sleep from pure exhaustion. I was going around absolutely shattered, in absolute and uncontrollable grief. I missed Matthew, especially, every day. To say I adored the ground he walked on would not be enough. I can still see his face as clearly as I am looking at you.

Reaching for a napkin on the hotel bar table where we are sitting he lifts his glasses to wipe tears from his eyes. "And because I was drinking and driving home I had to run out every morning to see if I had crashed the car or whether I had dreamt it again. If anything, my driving got more reckless. And still no one wanted to talk to me about it. There was every sign there that I was becoming an alcoholic, and still no one talked about it."

Dr Stephanie Regan, who was Killian's counsellor for three years, is a psychotherapist specialising in post-trauma care.

She says the effect of a fatal road traffic accident on the driver will depend on the person. For weeks, months and possibly years, almost all will be imprisoned in their own thoughts, distanced from the world, as their minds try to process the enormity of what they have experienced.

"There is a psychological numbness, and a constant staggeringly intrusive recall of the scene. They will be distracted, never fully focused on their relationships or their job because a part of their brain will always be trying to work through what has happened. There will be enormous guilt, anger, dismay with life, complicated depressions and low self-esteem," she says.

There are numerous factors in any accident and the driver is rarely solely to blame, she says, but so painful is the idea of revisiting the scene of the carnage, they may be too terrified to allow themselves work through it.

"If they don't work through it though, they may never put it aside," which could result in a permanent change in the person's personality, a "bending of the self - a phobic defensive reaction". Or there could be a withdrawal of the person from the world - a "self-protective closing of the self because just feeling may be too painful. But this means also that they are closed from the possibility of good feelings, and at the back of their minds they know they are not living, rather looking at the world from the outside".

A driver need not know the people his or her accident has killed to experience an immense grief for their loss of life.

"There are always resonances. We all have a sister or brother or child or parent who could have been that person killed. We grieve for what those persons could have been," Dr Regan says.

Killian feels he has now come to terms with what happened in January 1986.

"The hairs no longer stand on the back of my neck at the mention of the word `January'. Of course I still think of it and treat it with the respect it deserves, but it no longer stops me living."

Last year there were 71,337 speeding offences where fines were issued. There were 3,036 charges for dangerous driving. Sixteen people were charged with dangerous driving causing death, and eight with dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm. So far this year, 316 people have been killed on Irish roads. Excessive speed is said to have been a factor in a majority of these.