Suspend your cynicism folks, because the answer is not what you'd think, writes KILIAN DOYLE
TIMES ARE tough. Anguish abounds. We’re overburdened with horrors these days: floods, swine flu, Nama, football, Jedward. The list goes on.
And we can’t even spend our way out of the morass of misery anymore. The economy is staring long and hard into a deep, dark abyss, where the Celtic Tiger is crouching on a rocky outcrop mewling for scraps like a mangy back-alley moggy.
What we need is a good laugh. Preferably at our own expense.
So how relieved was I, in my hour of direst need, that He Who Must Be Dismayed – otherwise known as my editor – plonked something on my desk here in Emissions Towers that was so funny it’d bring a smile to the face of an estate agent. ‘Twas, you’ll have guessed, a survey. Of European Driver Behaviour, no less.
I groaned. Imagining it would be as turgid as a Chinese phonebook, I was waiting until he’d stormed off to torment some other minion so I could fling it out the window like all the other useless guff we get sent, when the top headline caught my eye.
It boldly stated that Ireland has the most law-abiding drivers in Europe. Come again?
According to the survey, which polled 8,000 people across 10 European countries, we are the least likely to use mobiles while at the wheel, drive without seatbelts, speed or jump the lights. A mere 3 per cent of us admitted driving while under the influence of alcohol, compared to a European average of 21 per cent, and just one in five of us confessed to overtaking or turning without signalling.
How we laughed. Indeed, I was guffawing so heartily on my perch that I nearly chucked my lunch of dry black bread and sugarless tea all over the former hedge fund manager we’ve employed to lick the floor clean. (We’re not entirely heartless. We pay him €3.16 an hour. Not to be sniffed at.)
You can understand my scepticism, unhealthy though it may be. The evidence I see on Irish roads every day would suggest that enough wool to keep a blue whale warm is being pulled over somebody’s eyes.
I’m not, of course, suggesting for a nanosecond that those who carried it out employed anything but the most stringent of statistical methodology. But they evidently didn’t realise who they were dealing with when they came to their conclusions.
See, this is Ireland, a country where “mental reservation” is lauded as a high intellectual concept. Everybody here lies. Bankers. Bishops. Politicians. Fibbers and spoofers to a man.
As the adage goes, monkey see, monkey do. So if the great and the good make lying their modus operandi, why would anyone but the most naively credulous market researchers believe a word that comes out of the mouths of the rest of us filthy proles? (I’m no saint in this regard myself. The Census thinks I’m a Jedi Knight who speaks 13 languages.)
Furthermore, it must be noted this survey was carried out for insurance giant Axa. And who in their right mind is going to reveal to an insurance company that they drive like Tiger Woods?
I was chortling away at the brazenness of the sleeveen Irish respondents and the gullibility of the surveyors when HWMBD threw more sets of stats at me that burst my self-satisfied bubble.
Incredibly, the number of people seriously injured in crashes in the State between 2006 and 2008 fell by 30 per cent, according to research from the European Transport Safety Council. It’s also expected that the number of people killed on Irish roads this year could dip below 250 for the first time since records began in 1959.
Crikey. Maybe the survey’s respondents were telling the truth after all. What other explanation is there?
I have to admit that it would appear that my cynicism, for once, may be unfounded. Which is nice. I feel so much better now.