PRESENT TENSE:It sometimes seems as if certain ad campaigns are planned from the slogan onwards. This week the Road Safety Authority unveiled "He Drives, She Dies". It's a message, in a rhyme.
It just happens to damn an entire gender, while supplying statistics that demand - but do not get - context. There is no doubting the heartfelt intentions behind such campaigns, but they don't guarantee results. Many road safety ads already appear to be created by people who can't get over their excitement at having a few special effects to play with. Yet, in an era of ever-more horrific representations of car crashes, the most effective ads may be those that touch on an emotional core. For example, the ad in which a young mother feeds her partner through a straw; or those created by the listeners of Ray D'Arcy's radio show, in which family and friends of victims spoke honestly and naturally.
However, the effectiveness of these campaigns can be questioned. Not by the advertising agencies, though, who wave tomes of market research showing that the public wants the ads, and wants them to be graphic. Yet, when you put the ads alongside the statistics, their impact is uncertain. Even Gay Byrne, the chairman of the RSA, admitted two years ago, "I don't know what else we can do. We have done all the horror ads, but there are obviously a great number of people who don't look at television, listen to radio, or read newspapers and don't get the message."
Compare crash rates to the increased law enforcement, and a trend is clearer: the threat of being caught is truly effective in deterring reckless driving. This week, the Garda in Kildare stuck a cardboard cop car on the side of the road, and it worked a treat.
That tactic has been used elsewhere in the country, and around the world, and while obviously not as acceptable as deploying actual police cars, it gives us a quirky and tangible insight into what triggers a response from drivers. It's likely that sustained law enforcement slowly embeds in the population a habit of more responsible behaviour. If this is coupled with decent road surfaces, lighting and signage, then crashes decline. Those behind the ad campaigns argue that they tackle the national psyche, but they have yet to be proven to be anything other than high-profile accessories.
Still, they come, and "He Drives, She Dies" is intended to "empower" women into rejecting lifts if they feel scared. (Empowerment, by the way, is something available exclusively to women. Men long ago maxed out on it and have had their supplies withdrawn.) The campaign tells us that two-thirds of female victims of road crashes are in cars driven by men. It's an unfortunate generalisation behind which must lie individual stories, in which the driver was not always to blame. And what about the male drivers or passengers killed - are they somehow less valuable? In the rush to get the point across, the RSA has inadvertently slurred the men who are no longer around to defend themselves.
Obviously, this campaign is also aimed at young men's egos. It follows a recent television ad in which a guy in a bar hovered over an alcoholic drink that sat beside his car keys, while his lady friend gave him a look suggesting that he order a fizzy water or - wink, wink - he would be going home alone.
It was a neat twist on the traditional link between cars and sex. Whether it works is another matter.
However, where these campaigns may succeed is not only in cementing the stereotype that all young men are bad drivers, but in allowing the rest of the population to believe themselves to be good ones.
By repeatedly focusing on young men as the perpetrator, they portray everyone else as a victim. Clearly, young men are more likely to be involved in road crashes, but we have to ask if we are treating them as scapegoats, allowing the rest of us to shoulder less responsibility. Women over 30, for instance, are far more likely to drink-drive than younger women. Long-term drivers may not have seen a copy of the Rules of the Road for decades; they may not even have passed a test, but received one during the licence amnesty. Much of the country spent years ignoring the provisional licence system.
Elderly drivers' reaction times are slower, their eyesight inferior to younger drivers, and they are also more likely to die if involved in a crash. And there are a great many people who believe that, because they have always driven home with a few drinks on them, then they should just be left to do so in peace. That it's the young drivers who should be targeted by the law, not them. So prevalent is that attitude in this country that you regularly and openly hear politicians defending it.
Every section of society is responsible for road deaths, even if young men feature most in the statistics. It's also a fact that most of us - male or female, young or old - only behave ourselves when threatened with a penalty. Ad campaigns are not proven to be nearly as effective as enforcement; and clumsy campaigns will only ever be less helpful. Perhaps the money would be better spent on more cardboard cop cars.
