Whatever the inquiry into the Dublin bus disaster discovers, it cannot begin to explore the pathological disdain of public authorities towards pedestrians, writes Kevin Myers.
This is so deep-rooted that it's no longer noticed by those who create and implement planning and traffic policies.
Question: how does Dublin Bus perceive pavements? Answer: as short cuts round corners, and anyone in the way had better step back. In different circumstances, I might have made a whimsical observation or two about the consequences for the infirm or the old or the stupid; but that is now neither right nor necessary. Yet the right to imperil people on foot is a central feature of bus and pedestrian management in Dublin. The rule that pedestrians on the pavement have to make way for buses turning at corners is so accepted that no one questions it any more; and since a fatal death is actuarially certain one day to result, it will therefore be no accident, but policy. Yet when it does happen, as it will, any inquiry will no doubt find that the driver took an illegal short-cut, without acknowledging the culture and the habit which both formed the precedent to this death, and made it inevitable.
The most obvious crush-point that I know is at the junction of Fleet Street and Westmoreland Street beside the Irish Times offices. Bus drivers have to make a right turn there which, because of the angle involved, is usually possible only by mounting the pavement. This is not a delinquency of individual drivers; it is a systemic delinquency which unites Dublin Corporation and Dublin Bus in a melancholy conspiracy against the mere mortal on foot. Dublin Corporation owns the pavement, yet doesn't insist on buses remaining off its kerbs; Dublin Bus owns the vehicles which force their way over pedestrian-only pavements, and it also devises the routes, and the impossibly sharp turns, which make these intrusions inevitable.
The failure to give pedestrians secure, vehicle-free walkways is one of the defining features of modern Irish planning. Take the vast conurbation of Ballyowen outside Lucan: it is a straightforward, if unconscious, conspiracy against pedestrians and children - almost all the main housing areas have been built without footpaths. This is simply criminal, but it is not, alas, unique.
I mention Kill and Newbridge in Co Kildare because I know them, but they're probably representative of many other small Irish communities which have become the locus for fresh developments on their outskirts. In both cases, pedestrians going from new housing clusters to the local shops have to walk on narrow, footpath-free country roads. This is dangerous in daytime; at night it is positively lethal.
How is it possible that South Dublin or Kildare County Councils gave developers permission to build these houses without insisting that kerbed footpaths to the local shops were constructed first? Did they give planning permission without stipulating that paths should be built? Or did they fail to enforce a planning permission requirement for such footpaths on the builder? Either omission is equally scandalous. It is as if morality is observed only when enforced by the courts.
Thus in Kill and Newbridge (and other such places) mothers have to push buggies alongside the lunatic boy-racers who have become such an enchanting feature of Irish rural life. They live in the country, to be sure, but beside a death-trap where pedestrians are shown no mercy by those who supervise our planning laws or build the houses.
The icing on this tasty cake of lunacy is our insane national speed limit of 60 m.p.h. along boreens, on which anyone on foot is in extreme danger, at day or night.
Mr Seamus Brennan's proposal to reduce speed limits on some roads to 50 m.p.h. is barely relevant, since there are thousands of Irish country roads where even 30 m.p.h. is too fast. Moreover, his suggestion that local authorities might introduce speeds lower than 50 m.p.h. merely passes responsibility to the very lads who permit housing estates without pavements, and who - apparently - can't see a children's sandpit without, in their planner's eye, envisaging it as a high-speed roundabout.
The failure to create pathways along rural roads is a primary reason for the many pedestrian deaths after nightfall - though, admittedly, the refusal of people on foot on country roads too wear reflective clothing in the dark defies all understanding.
Children can't walk to school, even round the corner, in many rural areas because there's no footpath connecting their little housing estate with the neighbourhood school. No wonder we are raising generations of Billy and Bessy Bunters, with multiple chins, heading for teenage coronary bypasses - for even if the little fatties wanted to walk to school, they simply couldn't. And in Dublin, of course, pavements are too regularly traversed by buses turning at sharp angles, or are used as cycle speedways by messengers, for parents ever to allow their children on them unaccompanied.
Unsurprisingly, Irish drivers' annual mileage is twice the EU average - more, indeed, than even the US, for Ireland is now a car-friendly, pedestrian-hostile country. Rather like SAS men disguised as cattle, with cow-pats fore and aft, the appearance of footpaths alongside country roads has long been a sign that one has entered Northern Ireland.
Like eating more beef and drinking more beer than we should, a systemic and all-prevailing ignorance about the needs of people on foot has become a cultural norm in Irish life. Indeed, it's so normative that most planners and councillors probably think that pedestrians are sex-offenders, and if you ask me, hanging's too good for 'em.