We motorists have a moral obligation to police ourselves on the endless lonely, winding roads throughout Ireland

When the terrible news travels of road collisions like that which claimed the lives of Alana Harkin and Thomas Gallagher after midnight on Monday, the national reaction is always the same. The reasons or the “why” of the crash are for An Garda Síochána to investigate and, in time, the inquest to establish. We, the public, learn of incidents like this with a low sense of dread followed by an intense stab of sympathy for the victims, their families and their wider community of friends and loved ones.

All road deaths are shocking in their violence and abruptness. But it is human nature that young lives lost cause the public to stop in their tracks. The photographs of those victims that appear on news bulletins, on news-stands, on digital streams, are never less than heartbreaking because their faces tell stories of optimism, vitality and fun. The photos of Alana Harkin and Thomas Gallagher, both 18 years old, contained so many of those qualities. The details of their journey – travelling home from an evening shift in a restaurant in Donegal – place them in a category no different from thousands of young people around Ireland that same evening. They were just going about an ordinary day.

August took a particularly grim toll on Irish road users, with 26 deaths. At the end of the month, Road Safety Authority (RSA) chairperson Liz O’Donnell admitted she was dreading Electric Picnic, which has become an end-of-summer pilgrimage. The idea of tens of thousands of young people out on Irish roads, travelling to a single destination and returning home from a three-day festival “is just my idea of a nightmare after the week we have had, so we put out a statement calling on people to be responsible coming home from the Picnic whether they are tired or hungover”, she said.

[ Death on Irish roads: Why have so many people been killed in crashes this year? ]

O’Donnell’s words reflect the low background anxiety that all parents experience, at some level, when their children are old enough to start driving and travelling independently. That anxiety is inevitably informed in part by their acquired knowledge of years and decades spent driving on Irish roads.

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We have always fretted about the roads in Ireland. In October 1980, RTÉ reporter Joe Little delivered a shocking report for Today Tonight on the state of Irish roads. Potholes were the scourge of the country at that time. Little tucked his trouser bottoms into his socks and braved a series of secondary roads on his Raleigh bicycle to demonstrate the bone-shaking discomforts and dangers of trying to cycle on Irish roads. “Cycle lanes” did not exist, even in theory.

Among the proposals in the Road Development for the 1980s plan was to circle the potholes with white paint so that motorists and cyclists would at least have a chance to see them before they hit them. “The chief culprit is the juggernaut,” Little says as we see file footage of a heavy-goods vehicle ploughing along a narrow road engineered in years when traffic was sparse. Even in 1980, the arteries were clogged, with towns like Naas and Swords continually bottlenecked with traffic crawling from Dublin to Belfast or to the south and west. The figures for road deaths remained shockingly high throughout those decades – 640 lives lost in 1972; 614 in 1979; 535 in 1983. It was 478 in 1990, the year in which Irish society began to get to get to grips with road safety.

In 1990, there were 220 cars per 1,000 Irish citizens on the road. By 2020, the comparable statistic was 446 per 1,000 people. Over the intervening decades, many households have become two-car homes. The data obviously reflects the rapid economic expansion and household wealth over the period. But it also tells the story of a national transport system that remains, to many citizens, simply non-existent.

In the 1970s and 1980s, with society increasingly mobile, people in one-car families in homes outsides towns and villages simply could not leave the house when the car was “away”. Juggling the use of the car was a constant daily consideration. Hitchhiking was a common practice, both at a national level, with hitchers thumbing lifts from one coast to the other and at a local level, where young people would hitch a lift to town. The bus and rail network were what it was: you had to get to the stations to avail yourself of them. Small wonder that as income rose and older, second cars became obtainable, many homes came to regard them as a necessity.

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The big achievement, over those decades, was that as the number of vehicles on Irish roads doubled, the number of fatalities began to drop. Improving road surfaces doubtlessly played its role, along with the establishment of the National Car Test in 2000 and the RSA in 2006. Anyone who has listened to O’Donnell speak about road safety will be left in no doubt about the emotional investment she brings to the role. Like Gay Byrne before her, she is a figurehead and spokesperson for a national movement. But it is an incredibly onerous and weighty role to take on.

The profile of Irish motoring has changed radically since Joe Little’s report. Of our 5,306 kilometre national roads network, some 916 kilometres are now motorways. That figure will increase. The startling rise in SUV culture has become a trend in its own right. For many of us, cars are more than just a means of transport. Whether the cliche of status symbol still applies, to many, cars are a luxury which the motorist as consumer craves and is willing to pay the equivalent of a small mortgage to own – whether outright or on higher purchase, ignoring the fact that the car is, from the moment of ownership, a depreciating asset. It is not just the much maligned “petrol-heads” – there are the younger generation who lavish, accessorise and repurpose the shells of cars for speed jaunts on country roads. Irish people have come to love their cars.

But in other ways, nothing has changed. Even if the road surfaces have been improved and, in many cases, completely transformed, vast sections of the national network contain narrow, winding roads with unpredictable bends and cambers. They are, by necessity, populated by the heavy-goods vehicles delivering essentials. Cars can “go” faster than ever. Everyone believes they are time poor. The RSA estimated that 40 per cent of motorists break speed limits on country roads. It would be a surprise if the real figure is that low. Policing and persuading the public to adapt safer practices has become a more complex issue.

At the start of August, 100 people had lost their lives on Irish roads, an increase of 11 people since that point in 2022. That bleak total includes pedestrians and cyclists. Twenty-three of those victims were aged between 16-25. Forty-nine per cent of the incidents occurred between the hours of 8pm and 9am.

Geographically, three counties – Cork, Galway and Mayo – accounted for almost one-third of the total number of lives lost. There is a sense of randomness about that statistic, of a nationwide game of roulette. But those three counties are all big, remote west of Ireland counties and are heavily dependent on the roads for transport. Beyond the cities and major towns, they share a lack of a plausible, usable, national public transport option. The lack of an alternative literally drives people to their cars. Climate change does not bode well for seasonal rainfall: in a country where rainfall is particularly saturated along the western seaboard, the option of cycling is not entirely realistic. And the cycle lanes are often substandard to non-existent anyway.

The RSA is tasked with communicating a complex series of safety alerts, with failure to wear seat belts on the rise, the ubiquity of phone usage a scourge among drivers of all ages and the international problem of speed still an issue.

Questions abound. Are fines and penalty points for speeding effective? A lot of motorists, if they are honest, have received penalty points for speed fines. The sting soon fades. And many will claim with some justification that the speed vans are located at what are, in essence, “speed traps”. If young male drivers in the 18-24-year-old age group are, as a cohort, most at risk and causing most risk, then perhaps a draconian one-strike punishment of an automatic license loss and six month driving ban for any breach of the rules is the only way to get the RSA and Garda message through.

According to the Central Statistics Office 2019 national travel survey, 60 per cent of respondents reported using a car at least five times a week. Almost 50 per cent never used a bus and just more than 50 per cent never used a train. A further 30 per cent use public transport less than once a month. They cited lack of services or nearby train stations as the main reasons. Of all respondents, 2.6 per cent said they had been involved in a traffic collision the previous year. Of that group, young men (aged 18-24) had the highest collision rate at 4.3 per cent. Women in the 55-64 age bracket had the lowest collision involvement, at 0.8 per cent. It all points to a society which, beyond the major cities, is utterly dependent on the car.

[ There have been more road deaths so far this year than in all of 2022. Something’s badly wrong ]

As winter deepens, the figure for 2023 stands at 166 lives lost, 11 more than the total lives lost in 2022. The trauma and the debate over how to reverse that escalating figure goes on. Donna Price, a bereaved mother and co-founder of the Irish Roads Victim Association, this week on RTÉ Radio described the tragedies as “soul-destroying for those of us impacted”.

“There is no turning back the clock for those families,” Price said. She has called for a more visible and obvious Garda presence on Irish roads to deter the dangers of speeding drivers, of drivers using phones, of intoxicated drivers. But she also acknowledged that the gardaí cannot be everywhere, all the time. There are endless lonely, winding roads throughout Ireland and with them a moral obligation on motorists to police ourselves.