Since December 1 2023, 14 people have died on the roads of the South. That’s not so much a grim statistic as a shameful loss of life. Normal healthy people get up in the morning, leave home and never come back. And that was happening roughly every second day. It’s tempting to point the finger at the garda, since they are the ones that always arrive at the scenes of such car smashes, they are the ones that are supposed to enforce speed limits, test for alcohol; but there’s more to it than that.
Every make of car I can think of is capable of doing 80 m p h or more, even though the legal maximum is less than 70 m p h. For a time I thought we’d managed to shame drink-driving out of existence, but it appears not so. Over a third of fatal crashes involve drink.
Try picturing this. Every second day, the authorities in Dublin sanction the public death of an individual, there would be horror, and those who were involved in allowing such a horror would be incarcerated. Yet a public death happens on the South’s very good roads, on average, every second day. And don’t tell me the figures are better than they were. Maybe they are, maybe they’re not. There shouldn’t be any mortality figures at all.
It can be done. Ryanair last year flew over 14 million people. Not one of them died. Last year world-wide, there were some 85 people who died in a plane crash, but these were propellor planes. No jet planes involved the death of anybody last year.
One day people will look back at the present age and say “They allowed millions of individuals to drive towards each other at a combined speed of about 150 mph, in cars built to break the speed limit, and no one cried ‘STOP!’ What a bunch of crazies!”
Humankind learns so slowly on so many fronts, it’s hard to believe it isn’t brain-damaged.
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