Present Tense:An interesting statistic popped up briefly this week, over a year since its first fleeting appearance. The offences of driving unaccompanied on a provisional licence and the non-display of L-plates have not been in the top 3,000 cases brought before the courts in a given year, writes Shane Hegarty
There have been 3,000 illegal activities more likely to land you in trouble. You'd spend the rest of your life trying to guess them all, but each was considered more serious than driving two tons of metal and fuel at high speed, without proving that you even know which button works the window wipers.
This is about to change. Even before the new Road Safety Strategy was announced this week, a Kildare district court judge had announced that he was going to start disqualifying offenders. Among his first targets was a provisional driver, fined €150 for driving unaccompanied. That driver must have stared at the judge with simmering incredulity. Driving without a qualified driver? Sure, your honour, you'd need to fine anyone who has ever had so much as an impure thought about furry dice. The provisional licence is part of our culture, our heritage. Our fathers drove on them, and our father's fathers before them. Some of them still do. Unless they managed to get a licence by, say, buying it for £1 in the 1950s, or getting it in the great amnesty of 1980.
The various laws surrounding the provisional licence have been among the most disregarded in the land. But, while acknowledging the State's administrative incompetence, we should ask if we're using it to disguise our own personal irresponsibility.
Excluding those who have a licence but never passed a driving test, 431,900 are driving on provisionals - more than one in six drivers. But you do not see one in six refusing to take the motorway because they're not allowed on it. You do not see them hanging around in car parks, waiting for a licensed driver to hop in and keep them company.
Instead, we've become quite used to casually breaking the law. And while we have increasingly recognised this absurdity, there are still enough objectors who feel that any hardening of the law is just another erosion of our right to act as stupidly as we can get away with.
The new road safety strategy, however, should bring this to a stop, although Noel Dempsey's subsequent promise of a "common sense" approach for two or three months means it won't be as sudden as first proposed.
Alongside the problem caused by the backlog of tests, objections to dealing with the provisional licence problem have included the idea that the huge number of cases will soak up Garda manpower and clog up the courts. (Exactly the same argument, as it happens, was put forward during the debate over seatbelts.) This presumes that every learner driver needs to be sought out and prosecuted, when the introduction of penalty points has proven instead that people follow the law when they feel that there's a real threat of being caught.
Eventually, legal pressure gives way to cultural expectation. Most people put on their seatbelts automatically now. They don't need someone standing over them looking at them as they do it.
But it took a while. As recently as 1991, only half of drivers wore a seatbelt. By 2003, that figure was at 85 per cent and climbing. Compliance, though, noticeably jumped with the arrival of penalty points, suggesting that we react better to the stick than the carrot. The Government has learned this lesson, which may be why it has ambushed learner drivers in this way.
We believe ourselves to be a people cheekily insolent towards authority, and objectors complain of another infringement by the nanny state, yet time after time - the smoking ban, penalty points - we've begun to look after ourselves and others only when we absolutely have to. When we can't get away with it any longer.
In the UK, meanwhile, over a 12-month period learner drivers will have to prove they can cope with rain, motorways and city streets before they can drive alone. And because statistics show that the risk of a crash increases when a young driver is accompanied by teenage passengers, it considered barring new drivers from carrying 10 to 20-year-olds between the hours of 11pm and 5am. It is considered unenforceable, and will not happen. Not now, at least.
We have much catching up to do. The belated political will to tackle the problem reflects how short sighted and petulant both the Government and drivers have been. And, when the system and the attitude are finally reformed, we'll look back in 10 years time and ask why we wore our L-plates for so long.