How To End The Carnage On Irish Roads

The Irish media has been inundated over the last few days with debate about how to deal with the dangerous driving on our country’s roads.

This has been prompted by a weekend of utter carnage in which eight people lost their lives; five men, one woman and two children. And though this is a particularly high statistic for a single weekend, it is by no means surprising; we have become accustomed to hearing about horrendous crashes and loss of life on an almost daily basis. From time to time we may wonder just how this could happen as consistently as it does. But to anyone who actually drives on these roads, the only shocking thing about the statistics is that they are not higher.

A few weeks ago I drove from Cork to Dublin to see a gig. The 3 1/2 hour drive was a horribly stressful experience. As is acknowledged daily on the national media, Irish motoring is treacherous at best. I use my car pretty much every day, and I regularly drive from Cork to Kerry. But it takes a good long journey to Dublin to really demonstrate just how bad things really are. So, I’ve decided to share with you some observations based on that trip and other experiences in the last few months.

1) The speed limits are a gentle suggestion, rather than a law. Nobody takes heed of them. If you drive at the speed limit, you will be overtaken by almost every car behind you. Fact. Not only that, but you will be invariably tailgated for miles while intolerant drivers wait for that window of opportunity to tear past you.

2) There are scumbags all over the roads driving tin missiles at ridiculous speeds. Paint me pink bigoted polka dots, but I am sick and tired of being p.c. when it comes to this issue. I am all for an inclusive society, but let’s not keep out minds so open that our brains fall out. To me, some scobe in a Honda Civic crashing at 140 kmph into an oncoming car is the same as some scobe murdering an innocent passerby with a screwdriver. These people don’t care about the consequences of their actions, how easily what they are doing can end in the wanton destruction of human life. They don’t care because it hasn’t been taught to them – and even if they do mow down some innocent pedestrian, they know perfectly well that it will be treated as a motor “accident” rather than manslaughter or murder in a court. A fine, then jail for a few months, maybe a few years. So what?

3) Just to provide an example of the above: On the way to Dublin, we stopped at the house of an acquaintance. While there, an unknown friend of that friend arrived into the house and announced, proudly, that he had just been racing a new car. “That was fastest I ever drove”, he said, “150 mph”. Just to reiterate, folks: that’s One Hundred and Fifty Miles per hour. On the main Cork to Dublin road. Now, why would this idiot walk into a room and say something like that? Simply, because he knows that he can. And that’s the typical Irish attitude; if you can get away with it, then it’s acceptable. It’s a little anecdote to share with others, even people you’ve just met.

4) Irish motorists take the stupidest risks on a regular basis. Aside from the aforementioned tailgating, the most common is overtaking at totally inappropriate places, not to mention speeds. Driving home to Kerry from Cork yesterday, my sister and I both saw, within five minutes of each other, two near-collisions on the main Cork-Mallow road. Both were approaching bends in the road, and both doing at least the speed limit. The first one, in particular actually had to swerve at the last second to avoid ploughing into oncoming traffic. And you know what? Noone blew their horns, everyone carried on as normal. Why? Because this reckless behaviour IS normal on Irish roads. This happens all the time. It is common knowledge that if you drive certain routes, you are guaranteed to see people driving like maniacs.

There is a very simple solution to all of this. And it bypasses the whole debate over whose fault it is – the RSA’s, the drivers themselves etc. Because at this point, all that is moot. The simple solution is this.

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Ready? Here we go.

UNMARKED CARS.

Let me explain with another example. On that same stretch of road I just mentioned (Cork – Mallow), there actually was a garda presence yesterday. And it was this: A big white Garda car parked on the side of the road, barely hidden, and blatantly visible at least about 5-10 seconds before actually passing it. The SUV that had just passed me out, doing about 130 kmph, slowed down to the speed limit as it passed. About 30 seconds later it had accelerated to its original speed and soon vanished from view. That Garda car being there was totally useless. And even if he gets three penalty points and a fine, so bloody what? He can still get back in his SUV and drive away, safe in the knowledge that the odds of actually being caught again are miniscule.

If the Gardai stopped driving around in stripy white cars with the word GARDAI emblazoned across the front of it, maybe – just maybe – they’d have more chance of actually catching people breaking the law, don’t you think? Because, let’s face it, the methods they are using at the moment are all but useless.

Why, for the love of God, don’t they just go out in unmarked cars? This simple move, implemented on a wide enough basis, would have a massive impact on drivers’ behaviour. At the moment, if you speed all the way through your road trip and don’t encounter one of those big white cars, you know you’re grand. There are no repercussions whatsoever for your behaviour, and you will do it again. It becomes habit, as does all the aggression and impatience that you’ll feel when stuck behind someone actually obeying the limit.

But if that car you just overtook at 140kmph suddenly hits sirens and flashing lights, pulls you over and spits out a pair of pissed-off cops who have caught you red-handed in the act of endangering the lives of other motorists (or even if you saw this happening to someone else) – you would seriously think twice about doing it again. If there’s even the vaguest possibility that the guy in front of you doing the limit is a cop, you might at the very least wait for a safe place to overtake.

The debates raging in the media about rolling out speed cameras, making drink driving laws more strict, enforcing provisional licences etc are all basically, distractions. And Fianna Fail badly needs these distractions at the moment, because the entire transport infrastructure in this country is a complete joke. In this country, if you have to get from A to B within a certain time, then you drive. The buses are totally unreliable, expensive and the drivers are often petty little Hitlers who could care less for the people they are transporting. The train service is even worse; they are prohibitively expensive, you are not guaranteed a seat, and the service has known to actually take longer to reach their destination than buses on the same route. That’s defying the laws of physics.

These services only survive because they are government-subsidised and have a total monopoly on the industry. They go on strike whenever they want, at the drop of a hat. Hey, they even decided to pull one over the weekend! From The Belfast Telegraph:

“Iarnrod Eireann has had to cancel more services this afternoon due to unofficial industrial action by some train drivers. Ten commuter trains operating on lines through Connolly Station have been cancelled due to the action, which relates to a dispute over rosters. This morning’s 6.30am Portlaoise to Dublin train and this evening’s 5.30pm service from Dublin to Carlow had already been scrapped as a result of the row.”

“A dispute over rosters“. I think that almost every person I know who has ever worked in shift jobs has experienced disputes over rosters. But they didn’t deal with it by going on strike, because the irresponsibility of doing so would have lost them their jobs. “Unofficial industrial action” basically means that these guys can do whatever they want, whenever they want. And the government allows them to do so with impunity. There is no responsibility, no regulation, no accountability for anyone. For Christ’s sake, is it even possible for one of these guys to get fired?

I don’t mean to seem facetious. Indeed, all of this would be funny if it weren’t so intimately connected to the carnage on our roads. People are avoiding using public transport, with good cause, and this means more and more cars on our streets, roads and motorways. And the total lack of effective motor law enforcement means that the CIE credo of “no responsibility, no regulation, no accountability” swells to embrace the dangerous drivers who know that nobody will police their actions.

Because without actual physical Garda presence on the roads, in a capacity that actually puts the fear of getting caught into people, nothing will change – absolutely nothing. It is the attitudes of motorists that need to be addressed. Graphic advertisements don’t work. News reports don’t work. The Gardai have to do their jobs as protectors of the peace and get out there and start catching dangerous drivers in the act.

And if using subterfuge is the most effective way to achieve that, then so be it.

10 Reasons Why The New Provisional Laws Won’t Work

Last week, the Irish government made the announcement that they would be introducing new laws to deal with the massive amount of deaths on our roads. At first glance, a positive turn of events. They went about it by bringing in new rules for provisional drivers; no longer would the Gardai turn a blind eye provisional drivers alone in the car (technically illegal) – said drivers would now face prosecution and fines of up to 1000 euros for each offence…

…all of which sounds fine and dandy until you consider the following:

1: Driving alone with a provision licence has been, for all intents and purposes, completely legal for decades. To turn this on its head is a lovely idea, but in practice makes little sense.

2: The Irish driving test system is a shambles of a mockery of a parody. Drivers may have to wait up to fifty weeks – just shy of a year – in order to take a test in centres that routinely have pass rates of less than 50%.

3: The test itself is totally impractical. It is based almost entirely on the use of the car’s mirrors, each of which must be checked roughly every ten to fifteen seconds throughout the duration of the test. NOBODY actually drives that in real life, since doing so would be dangerous. You concentrate on the road ahead and use the mirrors when you need to. It’s common sense.

4: The (as-yet unenforced) rules state that all provisional drivers must have a licensed driver in the car with them at all times. They must be sober, and have had a licence for over two years. Now, I ask you; what bloody difference does it make to your driving if the passenger has their licence or not? Are they going to give you pointers?? Regardless of licenced / unlicenced status the person in the car with you, you are still responsible for their safety – for their very lives – and should act accordingly.

5: The idea that drivers on provisional licences are more dangerous than those with full licences is a myth. True, the vast majority of deaths on our roads are caused by young men in fast cars, and they tend to fit the age group for people for provisional licences. But one statistic does not necessarily correlate with the other. In my personal experience, L drivers have a tendency to be cautious and tentative with their vehicles. I am much more wary of the fully licenced people, some of whom have a total disregard for common sense on the roads. Over the bank holiday weekend alone I saw two incidents that boiled my blood: First, on a country road, a car tailgated me for about 1/2 a kilometre before overtaking on a corner, narrowly avoiding a collision with an oncoming car. Second, on a motorway, a car overtook me and continued out of sight doing at least 140kmph. Neither of these cars had L plates up, and, we can assume, had drivers that were fully licenced.

6: There are simply not enough Gardai visible on the roads to get people to slow down. Fact. They can issue all the appeals and warnings they want, but if they are not out on the roads, nobody will listen.

7: I am one of those people who depends on my car for work. As a musician (and on a provisional licence), I need to bring my gear around to wherever I am playing, which means I need my car. The new law would mean that if I was to continue working, I would be breaking the law every single night I worked.

8: The Irish public transport system is a joke, monopolised from the off and left thereafter to fester. I could regale you for hours with the horror stories of people getting buses and trains around the country. Lost luggage, standing room only on long journeys where you have paid for a seat, drivers shouting at passengers, strikes happening at short notice, late buses, buses not arriving, buses driving straight past their stops, etc etc. And by the way; I booked a trip to Latvia over the weekend, and get this: It is costing me less to get there and back than it would for me to make a return trip to Dublin from Cork on the train. True story. As long as the government refuses to get address of the cesspool of idiocy and laziness that is the Irish transport system, we cannot blame people for getting into cars and driving, full licence or no.

9: But the best bit is yet to come: The new law was announced on the same day that Fianna Fail decided to accept a huge salary hike that had been recommended to them by an “independent study”. That’s right; in a country where in the last year, the water in Galway had human faeces floating around in it, where the health system is utterly overwhelmed on a daily basis, where the communications infrastructure remained years behind almost all our European counterparts, where death rates on the roads were catastrophic, and where Bertie Ahern himself was almost thrown out of government for shady financial doings, the government saw fit to substantially elevate the salaries of everyone.

10: And it gets even better. The government couldn’t even get the distraction right. The very next day after it was announced, its introduction was put back until the new year. The phone-in radio shows were a delight that day; one Road Safety Authority spokesman went on the radio at 1 in the afternoon, talking about who the law would save lives. At about 2 o’ clock, the RSA revealed across the media that the law was being put back until the start of the new year. And here’s the punchline – On the following Sunday, it was announced that the law was being put off until next June.

People are calling for the head of the Minister for Transport, Noel Dempsey. But I say, fair dues. He did his job; he bought enough headline space to offset the impact of the Government’s disgraceful pay hike. And he too got his reward – Dempsey now has an extra 15% added to his already substantial paycheque. And if he is forced to leave government, he will no doubt have a golden handshake extended to him – one that befits the circumstances of his resignation.