The new road safety strategy could make Ireland one of the five safest countries in Europe, writes Gay Byrne.
The publication of the Road Safety Strategy, 2007-2012 is a contradiction in terms, for me.
A strategy, by definition, is over-arching and long-term. It sets out to produce results, not tomorrow or the next day, but incrementally, over six years. This makes sense to the stakeholders, because they're all strategic planners, rather than reactors.
I carry enough of the immediate reactor from my broadcasting career to be constantly urgent about the road safety imperative. In fact, I suffer from chronic urgency when it comes to road safety. I want measurable, provable improvements in our statistics, delivered yesterday.
Statistics are only statistics when they appear in an annual report or in a computer graphic. Interrogate any one of them and they turn into tragedies.
Someone once said that all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unique in its misery. The same is true of road accident tragedies. They may have common factors. Youth. Speed. A powerful performance car. Alcohol. Another substance. But in their grievous impact on families and communities, each one of them is different.
Take the newspaper picture, the one we've all got grimly familiar with, because variants of it appear so often.
The photograph is usually taken by a professional - because professional photographers work at debs' balls and other social events. The composition is good, the colour even better, because each of the girls is wearing taffeta or silk in vivid, radiant, glowing colours. The fellows are all groomed to the nines in their rented tuxes. All of them laughing, confident, having the time of their lives.
That's the photograph. Underneath that photograph runs a caption or a report that's in sharp contrast to the photographic image - a report of how two or three or more of the happy, glowing, smiling young people in the shot have died on our roads.
It fills me with frustrated sadness, that kind of picture. I want to go out and grab anybody I can find, anybody I spot getting into a car or on to a motorbike. "Please. Everybody. Just slow down," I want to say. "Please let's put an end to the lethal culture of speed we have in this country."
I could be on media every day of the week, sending out that message, because media outlets are remarkably open and helpful to the road safety message. It might relieve my frustrations and flatter my need to do something urgently, but productive it would not be.
We now know that the countries with the best record of pulling down road mortality figures are the ones with a comprehensive, doable strategy, like the one the RSA has just published. Although it should be stressed that this is not the work of one agency. Forty-three government departments, agencies and industry representative groups made substantial inputs to it. Almost 500 submissions from individuals have shaped it.
Those inputs, those submissions came from a collective determination to save lives, which this strategy will do. Implemented, it gives us the potential to be one of the top five safest countries in Europe, moving us away from the position we're currently in, where we're playing catch-up with the rest of Europe when it comes to road safety.
With this strategy, we will achieve in six years what it took the best countries in Europe 20 years to achieve. Even before the publication of this strategy, we as a nation had been making progress through moves like:
• The establishment of a special Cabinet sub-committee on road safety, on which the Taoiseach himself sits;
• The introduction of mandatory alcohol testing and a new Rules of the Road. A neat and interesting booklet, the Rules of the Road should now be in every home in the country.
During the same period, significant progress has been made to introduce compulsory basic training for motorcyclists, and further vocational driver training for truck and bus drivers.
Inevitably, if you're a learner driver, the only fact in which you're interested is the fact that the waiting time for a driving test has dropped by a third and an extra 32 test centres have opened to tackle the backlog of people awaiting tests.
What you see, in the road safety issue, depends on where you're coming from: whether you're a driver or a pedestrian, a cyclist or earn your living behind the wheel of a truck. However, no matter where you find yourself, you can - at this point - register improvements in the infrastructure around road safety.
• A system for regulating the driving instructor industry has been introduced;
• A review of the roadworthiness testing of commercial vehicles has been conducted;
• The waiting time for a driving test has dropped by a third and an extra 32 test centres have opened to tackle the backlog.
These linked advances will allow us to improve on what's been achieved thus far. 2006 was the second-safest year on our roads in over 40 years in this country. To date this year, 35 fewer lives have been lost on our roads.
The strange thing, of course, is that one death on the road is a tragedy. To a family. To a community. But one life saved? Invisible. Unreal.
Curious paradox, is it not, that death could be more real than life. I can't point to Noel Brett, chief executive of the Road Safety Authority and say: "Noel, you're part of the 20 per cent of people who would be dead if we hadn't made this improvement."
We cannot identify the lives saved. But what we now can do is confirm that we're saving lives. The political commitment is there. The leadership is there. Government departments and agencies have committed themselves to the objectives contained in the strategy. The board of the RSA is determined to see this through.
To try to save lives on the roads is a worthy objective. It is an honourable intention. That's what the six-year strategy is all about. And what we are trying to do is save your life and the lives of your sons and daughters.
We want you to help us.
Gay Byrne is chairman of the Road Safety Authority