Six people fewer died last year on the roads than in 2000. Cause for self-congratulation? Kathy Sheridan thinks not and examines why there is an absence of will on this side of the Border to tackle the death toll on our roads.
The death toll for 2001 stands at 409. It may change; anyone who dies within a month of being involved in a road accident is added to the tally.
For now, the good news is that we have six more people alive than in 2000. Go back to 1997, when there were 472 deaths, and this year's figure looks more impressive. It suggests that the Government's five-year Road Safety Strategy, introduced in 1997, has saved 63 lives.
So should we celebrate? Probably not. Irish road-death figures are a hellish roller-coaster for anyone working to minimise them. For example, the figure for 2000 was identical to that of eight years before. In 1994 - when, as one garda put it, "no-one gave a toss about road safety" - we hit an all-time low of 404.
To reach the current strategy's five-year target of a 20 per cent reduction, road deaths this year will have to drop by 31. No-one is promising anything.
So what happened? One thing is certain: if the Road Safety Strategy is capable of saving lives, then the flip-side surely is that any delay in its implementation must be costing lives. In this case, delays make it truly a matter of life and death.
Eddie Shaw, chairman of the National Safety Council, is "content that progress has been made". But Shaw, passionate, outspoken and a master of his brief, cannot contain his frustration. "I'm not happy with the rate of progress. I'm aware that we could have and should be doing much, much more". The death and injury rate, he is certain, could be halved in five to seven years.
It is simply a matter of political will.
As he has nothing but praise for the commitment of the two Ministers in the Department of the Environment - Noel Dempsey and Bobby Molloy - what's the problem?
"I do not believe that the Department of Justice is fully behind the Government's Road Safety Strategy and that is one of the problems ", he says baldly. "The Garda are not getting the support they need from the Department to implement the strategy".
And a key part of that strategy is the penalty-points system. First promised by the end of 1998, the latest target date is October this year.
"The strategy is an integrated one. It's like a chain; every link has got to be closed and secure and you cannot pick and choose from its essential elements. You have to have an integrated technology system which enables the Garda to enforce penalty points in volume. You cannot enforce it with manual enforcement. It depends on high volume. If you introduce a penalty-points system with the aim that frequent offenders are going to get increasing penalty points so that eventually they lose their licence in a three-year period, you have to catch them. You need information technology, a mobile- and fixed-camera system and all the administrative back-up that this requires and that's a big investment - and that investment has been delayed for two years".
Meanwhile, across the Border, road deaths are down 24 on 2000. The fact that David Trimble made it one of his top three priorities at the Assembly may have something to do with it as well as the performance of Sam Foster, the Environment Minister, who never misses an opportunity to describe road tragedy as a "vale of tears". It is estimated that they spend £3 on the programme for every £1 spent in the Republic.
In the Australian state of Victoria, the new road safety strategy was launched by the Premier - with three of his ministers in attendance - and an announcement of additional resources to counteract a degree of complacency that had begun to set in.
In the Republic, by contrast, there wasn't a mention of the Road Safety Strategy in the Budget. Allocations for the vital Garda IT programme are by no means clear. A Garda source confessed to "complete dismay" at Budget time at what he took to be the "puny" percentage allocated of the amount requested. Little wonder then that within the Garda itself, traffic policing tends to be looked down on by the other specialities or that judges throw out or impose farcical fines for cases such as non-compliance with the law on seat-belts. How do committed gardaí feel when told repeatedly that in an Australian state the size of ours, they breathalyse a million people a year when we managed about 12,000 last year, our best year? How can Garda motivation be sustained in such a climate?
As it is, they must continue to watch 17- year-olds drive unaccompanied, with the full backing of the law, once they hold a second provisional licence. There is no time-scale - if ever - for the introduction of graduated phasing-in of licences for learner drivers (in Holland it takes three years to get a full licence), let alone some consideration given to a phasing-out programme for ageing drivers (as in parts of Australia) whose frailty may be a danger to themselves and others. There is no end in sight to the routine whereby judges restore licences to drunk drivers halfway through the disqualification period without therapy or evidence of changed behaviour.
There is no response to the demand for random breath-testing other than the old one that it may have constitutional implications. To which the retort might be, if we can have three abortion referendums, why can we not have one on an issue where more than 160 fully developed people are being needlessly killed every year?
The lack of political will, however, remains the greatest mystery of all. Is it about money? Time and again, it has been emphasised, not least by Eddie Shaw, that ultimately road safety is an investment strategy. In a report by economist Peter Bacon, he quoted a return on investment of 8 to 1. When Melbourne's Monash University studied it from the point of view of benefit to the community as a whole, it came up with a figure of 20 to 1.
Bacon estimated in 1999 that road accidents were costing us £800 million a year. To see the human fallout, one has only to look at the tombstones draped with football scarves in our cemeteries or talk to the parent of a brain-injured child. What price a decent IT programme and some steely political leadership compared with that?