The papers today are filled with news that Gay Byrne’s resignation is being sought. Apparently the 12 road-deaths in a 48 hour period earlier this week are his fault.
This is the logic of the great nation we inhabit. Carnage on the roads is solved by the chairman of an advertising committee being pressured to resign. How fantasticallly nonsensical. What on earth is that meant to achieve?
Not that the Road Safety Authority doesn’t do more than that. But they are not the ones who need to solve this problem. The responsibility for ending the epidemic of slaughter on our roads falls to two distinct groups, neither of whom seem remotely committed to doing a damned thing about it.
The government have a fundamental responsibility to legislate when all else is clearly failing. The time for half-measures (including the seemingly useless penalty points system) is well and truly over. Another death this morning means that 12 families have been devastated THIS WEEK. And it’s only Wednesday. What does it take for something to change? Surely there are TDs who have been touched by this increasingly desperate situation. Surely somebody within the Dáil chambers has lost a loved one. Statistically at this point they must have. So why the inaction?
I would love to be able to believe that it has nothing to do with the upcoming election. FF will not challenge farmers or publicans before that election (or, for the record, after). FF will challenge no norms for fear of pissing off the people that are frankly stupid enough to fall for the SSIA-bribe. What is needed to solve this crisis is strong government, airtight legislation, and absolutely zero tolerance.
Yes, you heard me, zero tolerance. Realistically nothing else has worked, let’s try something new and crazy called total sobriety. An alien concept I know, but work with me here. Permissable blood alcohol level should be zero, and no, I do not care that that means the-morning-after-the-night-before you still can’t drive and that you have to go to work. We all know people who wake up drunk the morning after, and just because you are almost conscious enough to sit at your desk entering numbers onto a datasheet all day does not give you the right to take my life in your hands. Blood alcohol level zero.
First offence? Get off the road. Never done a test but been driving on a provisional for 15 years and have picked up one or too foibles but ah sure that’s just the way? Get off the road.
Maybe I’m crazy, and maybe I’m the only one, but I would in an instant vote for a government with the pure balls to properly legislate against the constant irresponsibility perpetrated on the roads around this country on a daily basis.
Which brings me to the second group who will never willingly take responsibility for the carnage. Us. We, the people.
Every driver in this country. Every licensed driver, every unlicensed driver, everyone in between. We watch the ads, horrified by the images of children killed because of that one-drink-too-many the night before. We change the channel, because we get the idea, we know the message, don’t drink and drive, ah but sure only the one won’t do any harm.
We are a fantastically irresponsible group of people and somehow we have washed our hands of all responsibility - individual and collective - for murdering each other and each other’s children on a daily basis. We sleep soundly at night because after the three pints we had with the lads we managed to mostly stay on our own side of the road on the way home. We watch as those with two or three pints more than they should leave the pub and hop in the car to drive themselves the five miles home. Ah sure they’ll be grand, they’ve been driving for years. They know the roads. It’s quiet this time of night anyhow. Absolute C-R-A-P.
We are a pathetic, pitiful group of people if we can honestly continue to tell ourselves that this is somebody else’s fault. The nonsensical witch-hunt in today’s papers is perhaps the first sign of that denial beginning to crack.
Gay Byrne is not the one who’s resignation should be called for, and it is utterly laughable that he can be hounded in a way that the Minister for Health, the Minister for Justice, and in this case the Minister for Transport have avoided. The entire government, in fact, should, and must, be held responsible for their gross negligience in this area (and so many others). Police officers who let Jack Spratt off with a warning when he has four pints on him should be held accountable. Publicans who serve alcohol to those driving and who watch them get in their cars afterwards should be held accountable. We must all be held accountable for our own actions, and more so our own total inaction on this issue.
It is already too late for too many.
