The road crash which killed three young Irishwomen in Australia was the lead item on RTE television news the other night. This newspaper gave it only marginally less prominence, dedicating 42 columninches to it. In a tiny corner of the same page was a four-inch report on the deaths of four men on Irish roads.
Three Irishwomen dead in Australia; forty-two columninches. Four Irishmen dead on Irish roads; four column-inches. What set of unconscious values is being displayed here? Is it regard for female life over male? Possibly. Had the Australian deaths been male and the Irish deaths been female, would media coverage been so astonishingly unbalanced? Or is tragedy the greater when it involves young people together? Hardly; two young men killed in one crash were even younger than the Australian victims. Or is a matter of location? Maybe such an horror speaks to an ancient, atavistic fear, of death far away from home.
Political negligence
Or is it actually something else again? Is it that boring old psycho-babble term, denial? Are we happier tut-tutting over a calamity over which we have no control, which moves us because it is so awful, because it concerns our own, yet we may safely discharge ourselves of any responsibility for it? Is it safer to become stricken over the dead on the far side of the world than over the dead in our own hedgerows, whose deaths in part may be laid at the door of our own political negligence?
The four deaths on Tuesday night brought the toll on the Republic's roads this year to 239, precisely the same figure as this time last year. But we are not aiming for parity with the past; we are, under EU directives, aiming at reductions in road-deaths, and that is precisely what we are not getting.
That is hardly surprising. Not merely are we failing to meet the targets we are setting ourselves, but the targets themselves are hopelessly inadequate. So our failure is actually far greater than is being admitted; and simultaneously, we are being misled about the true cause of road death. All come back to government, to its failure to be both realistic and ruthless, to its abject failure to create safe roads in a safer environment.
I heard recently of a senior member of the Government who didn't know that the general speed limit on all country roads is as high as 60 miles per hour. Where I live, 60 m.p.h. is a recipe for death; yet it is legal. Many people try to get as close to it as possible; and though they are guilty of that judgmental crime of dangerous driving, they are not guilty of the measurable crime of breaking the speed limit. Other European countries have speed limits appropriate to the nature of the road; but on the single-lane roads in my part of Kildare, the legal speed limit is the same as it is on the Naas dual-carriageway.
Reducing speed
Look at the performance of the Government to date. In 1998 it set itself a 2002 target of halving the proportion of cars exceeding 60 m.p.h., which in 1997 stood at 40 per cent. Within the first year of the speed-reduction "campaign", the numbers of cars exceeding the speed limit had actually risen by 10 per cent. This is the sort of State performance which reminds one of the good old days of communism and its five year-plans. New targets aim for 40 per cent breaking the speed limit; but now, only on precisely the single-carriageway roads on which 60 m.p.h. is already far too fast. Dual-carriageways, apparently, are now to be law-free zones. All roads are equal; but some are more equal than others. Meanwhile, non-figures suggest a non-solution to a non-problem.
The National Road Safety Council's "finding" that 60 per cent of drivers tested for drink-driving had drunk more than twice the legal limit of alcohol was no more than saying that the conspicuously drunk were found to have consumed liquor. The samples were all taken by gardai from drivers whose driving suggested they were paralytic. Not merely were they drunk by our new legal standards, but they were drunk by the old ones too. Proving scientifically what is obvious to the human senses might provide some statistical comfort, but it hardly advances the cause of human wisdom. Quite the most terrifying finding of all was the 10 per cent of drivers who, when tested, were found to be below the limit. In other words, when sober, they drive as if they were drunk. Wonderful.
Country roads
Drink is a diminishing problem. Last year road-deaths were reduced by 17 per cent between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. - the traditional killing time for the drunk driver. What is killing people now is what has always killed people: speed. Far from tackling that problem vigorously, we have set ourselves standards which will do nothing to slow down drivers on those lethally narrow country roads where both speed and speed limits are too high and where a disproportionate number of deaths already occur.
I have written often and in vain of the twofold idiocy of permitting provisional licence holders to drive unaccompanied, with insurance. Now I ask John O'Donoghue, Minister for Justice, and Bobby Molloy, Minister of State for the Environment, this question: When will you take steps to stop this folly? For when a wholesale massacre next occurs at the hands of such a driver, as has already happened this year, if you haven't taken action, then rest assured: you will measurably be morally and politically responsible for those deaths.