Can there be any argument with the statement by Brian Farrell of the National Roads Authority about young male drivers, asks John Waters.
"There is a real male problem out there when it comes to driver behaviour," he said last week. "Perhaps it's their age, behaviour, fearlessness, peer pressure and some adrenalin rush. They think they can live forever and are invincible. I would appeal to mothers, sisters and girlfriends to try and knock a bit of sense into the men in their lives when it comes to driving." At an emotional level, this statement has enormous force.
To lose a brother or son through his own craziness is bad enough, but to lose a loved one through someone else's craziness must be unbearable. Mr Farrell's tone, verging on a desperate plea, matches the gravity of the issue.
The idea that young men might listen to someone, and listen to women more readily than men, seems plausible. But perhaps it is plausible because of the very flaws in our culture which have created the problem. In a certain sense, Mr Farrell's logic, however emotionally persuasive, may be seeking a cure in one of the root causes. We know, not just from the road-accident statistics but also from the mounting evidence of binge-drinking, suicide and numerous other indicators, that there is a serious problem with young Irish males. A couple of years ago, I attended a lecture in Dublin by the American Franciscan priest Fr Richard Rohr, about young men in the modern world.
His analysis, pointing in the opposite direction to Farrell's, suggested that what young men need is more contact with their fathers and with older men generally. He talked about rites of passage, about recreating a tradition of initiation by which young men could be affirmed in their manhood, about the damaging way in which men had become over-feminised - not just in our education systems, though those too, but the entire culture of western society, including Christianity. We have destroyed, he said, the transformative energies which men respect, which serve to connect young men to the mystical source of existence, to awaken them to pain and powerlessness and to usher them safely over the threshold into manhood. Women have, or had until recently, less need of such initiation, because the idea of motherhood provides a strong coherent meaning for girls, who also have a clear and painful moment of entry into womanhood. Men require this moment to be culturally supplied by the male elders who know where the journey leads. (Readers may recall similar ideas from Robert Bly's 1990 book Iron John.)
Gay Byrne recently gave a vivid description of driving in Donegal. You would be driving along a country road, he said, when up ahead you would see a car bouncing towards you at unbelievable speed. You prayed the young male driver would be able to maintain control until he had passed you by.
Contemplating this image, I was struck by the idea that there might be a comparison between our out-of-control male driver and the suicide bomber in some Muslim cultures. The context is different, but they seem both to be expressions of a perversion, a short-circuiting of meaning. Ideally, a child needs to grow up in a coherent tradition which, while transmitting its own principles with love and conviction, is open enough to enable the testing of its value system against others. The element in Islamic cultures provoking the emergence of the fundamentalist extremist appears to be the rigidity of the tradition and its poor adaptability to different forms of reality.
When Islamic culture is transplanted into a secularised, hyper-liberal environment, a host of complexes are created in the minds of some youngsters, who react by plunging deep into the tradition. Our culture is, in a sense, the opposite.
Having recently emerged from rigid tradition into a virtual free-for-all, we have replaced our prior insistence on the conveyance of a singular notion of meaning with a pick-and-mix culture in which the child is left struggling to comprehend reality. This, for the reasons already stated, affects males more than females.
The signals picked up by the young man tell him that he may find his meaning and identity as an entrepreneur, a sportsman or a plumber. But, because he is primed with questions that go far deeper than business, sport or plumbing, this provokes in him an extreme reaction not dissimilar in psychological terms to the reaction of the young Muslim man who, unable to reconcile the eternal culture with what he has been taught, dives backwards for reassurance into the deepest, darkest parts of the tradition.
The young Irishman, lacking this option, plunges forward in a hedonistic rush, and, because he finds himself on quicksand, speeds up to stay above ground. The two are equally out of control, but seek different ways to answer back.
One straps himself around with explosives and walks into a city. The other, perhaps less consciously, gets behind a steering wheel, puts the pedal to the metal and explodes onto a country road.