KEVIN MYERS AT LARGE: It is the dog that doesn't bark in the night which was the great riddle for Sherlock Holmes. And so it is for us. Why have the Opposition parties said barely a word about the Taoiseach's 85 m.p.h. motor-cavalcade through Wexford? And why has the issue of road safety - as opposed to violent crime or hospital conditions - not featured in this election, though it is uniquely in this category that Ireland has almost the worst record in Europe?
As a society, we seem to have made a collective subconscious decision that road deaths don't matter. All targets to reduce butchery on the roads have been missed, without a whimper of protest, yet speeding on bad roads kills. It was a Fianna Fáil-Labour government which actually increased the general speed limit on all minor roads to 60 m.p.h., so making it almost impossible for gardaí to successfully prosecute drivers driving dangerously at below that speed.
The stopping distance in good conditions at 60 m.p.h., with good brakes and with the driver alert, is all of 80 yards. These are figures in Rules of the Road, produced by the very Government which increased the general speed limit from 55 m.p.h. This was already far too high for many winding Irish roads, on which visibility is far less than 80 yards, throughout most of which distance an impact with a pedestrian would be lethal.
However, at 60 m.p.h. in the rain, a car will travel nearly 140 yards before it halts. For all but the last of those yards it will kill anyone in its way. And at the motorway speed limit of 70 m.p.h., in perfect conditions, and with a good driver, the stopping distance is 109 yards. In the wet, it is twice that - all of 204 yards.
Yet the Taoiseach's cavalcade was not even going at 70 m.p.h. It was travelling at 85 m.p.h., which is so fast that Rules of the Road contains no stopping distance for it. However, extrapolating from the geometric progression of greater stopping distances at greater speeds, if the Taoiseach's driver saw an emergency ahead and he began to brake in perfect conditions, his car would then travel some 160 yards before it halted.
But in the wet it would travel some 320 yards before it stopped. So too would the cars behind it - provided all the drivers' reactions were sharp, the road was straight, the brakes were good, and they hit nothing en route, though admittedly impact with a pedestrian will not greatly reduce either vehicle velocity or stopping distance.
A 100-yard high-speed convoy instantly translates into a lethal quarter of a mile of braking, skidding cars. There has been no one outstanding issue in this general election, except the one that yearly fills our hospitals and morgues, but which no one speaks of: the dog that didn't bark in the night.