PastImperfect

From the archives of Bob Montgomery, motoring historian

From the archives of Bob Montgomery, motoring historian

A short history of road safety: Like a dark shadow pursuing early motoring in Ireland, as the number of motor vehicles on Irish roads began to grow significantly in the second half of the first decade of the 20th century, so too did concerns about the number of accidents which were occurring on our roads. One of the first to grow concerned and to draw attention to the growing tragedy was the great motoring and cycling pioneer, RJ Mecredy.

As early as 1907, Mecredy was writing in the columns of his Motor News magazine of how the great adventure that was early motoring in Ireland was being sullied by drivers who left common sense behind when they drove, and by the callous disregard of some local authorities in ignoring the needs of motorcars and thus creating a wide variety of often fatal hazards on Irish roads.

Early fatalities almost always led to prosecution of the driver concerned - provided, of course, that he was still around to answer the summons! However, unlike England, where the anti-car lobby was still very strong, the courts in Ireland seem to have been much more lenient on the motorist.

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By the 1910s a raft of legislation had been introduced covering such items as leaving a car unattended in a city street and such ancillary items as the private storage of petroleum supplies. A uniform code of road signs did not begin to appear until the mid-1920s as did guidelines for signals by Garda and motorists. The first "semaphore" indicators also appeared around this time but remained far inferior to hand signals properly executed.

Driving tests were much talked about after the first World War and the subsequent explosion of the number of drivers and cars on Irish roads, but little happened. Driving licences had been introduced, along with vehicle index marks at the end of 1903, but no attempt was made to find out if the applicant was capable of conducting a vehicle without harm to other road users. The Irish Automobile Club had a system of written and road tests for intending chauffeurs which they had begun around 1905 but this had little effect on the general driving population.

The French, on the other hand, having taken the lead in so many aspects of the development of motoring, appreciated that a motorist's driving ability was not something to be taken for granted. As a result, visitors from Ireland or Britain were required to undergo a driving test when they landed in France before being allowed on French roads. As a result, in the early days motoring in France was limited for many Irish drivers to those who could afford suitably qualified chauffeurs.

Eventually, it was decided that the leading motoring organisations could carry out driving tests without reference to any government department and issue recognised certificates of competence. However, the situation remained confused and even after compulsory tests were introduced in Britain in 1935, they were not carried out in Ireland, north or south. In our case, of course, it was not until the mid-1960s that compulsory driving tests were introduced and even then their value in contributing to road safety was compromised by successive governments.

War on the roads: It's an extraordinary fact that, despite the petrol and tyre shortages which occurred during the second World War, the casualties suffered by the British armed forces in the first two years of the conflict amounted to 145,012, while the casualties on British roads in just 1942 amounted to 147,544.

In all probability this was the highest figure ever recorded for road accidents anywhere.