If you were a garda on duty in Naas Garda station, and you got a phone call one Monday from a fellow in Cork saying he had seen a dead body in a field, what would you do? ask Kevin Myers
Well, you'd probably ask him why he was reporting the matter to a Kildare Garda station, and not a Cork one, where the body is.
- No, no, the body isn't in Cork, it's in Kildare, the fine fellow would reply. Oh, I see, responds the garda, so you're from Cork, but you're in Kildare at the minute and you want to report a dead body, is that it?
- No, not quite. I was in Kildare, I saw the body, and then I drove to Cork.
- Ah, I see. No doubt you were in shock. But the moment you got home, you. . .
- Went to bed.
- Let me get this straight. Even though you found a dead body, you didn't report it locally, but drove 140 miles and went to bed, and you're reporting it now. Where were you in Kildare?
- I don't know. I was lost. I was trying the back roads because the N7 was so jammed.
- Jammed? It wasn't that jammed. Had you had a few scoops?
- I may have done. . .
- What time was this?
- Around midnight.
- Midnight? That's over seven hours after the match finished, and I'll bet you weren't drinking skimmed milk. What did the body look like?
- I'm not sure. It was very dark. It could have been a human. Or on the other hand, it could have been an animal.
- Very good, sir. I'll make sure I pass on this report.
Frankly, in my days as a super-sleuth, if I'd got a phone call like that, I'd have done what the lad in Naas probably did, and ignored it. Far more predictably serious things were going in the bailiwick of Naas than the tragic but understandable failure of one garda to take such an apparently frivolous phone call seriously.
That evening, thousands of motorists were heading south from Croke Park, on the best roads in the country, with two fears in their mind - that they might be going at 56 m.p.h. in one of those 50 m.p.h. zones which litter the N7, especially where the carriageways are widest and safest, and be caught in a speed trap. The second was that they might be hit by a drunk driver, who had confidently taken to the roads because there was no fear whatever of random breath-testing.
Five minutes around midnight in the centre of any town or city will tell you one certain truth: we are a nation of drunks. It simply passes all belief that we will be the year 2005 at least before we might even begin to get the sort of safety measure that recognises - and protects us from - this irrefutable truth. Not having random breath tests in this country is the social equivalent of an individual not wearing any sun-block in the Australian outback or not putting on an oxygen tank before going scuba-diving.
The outcome is entirely predictable. We are not dealing with probabilities, but absolute certainties, yet we appear to be incapable of doing anything about these certainties without running into legal walls. Why is this? Why are other countries able to impose random measures to curb drink-driving and we are not? Is it because all our lawyers are so heavily engaged in tribunals that we can't get a legal draughtsman to draw up a document that won't be torn limb from limb the moment it is tested in court? As my chum Seamus Brennan pointed out recently, gardaí have been concentrating their anti-speeding measures on motorways and dual-carriageways, on which only 3 per cent of fatal crashes occur. This is like testing for foot-and-mouth disease in a fish farm, while on the untested hillside all around, the disease is rampant. For one third of all fatal road deaths occur on tiny country back-roads, where gardaí are as common as rabbis in Iran.
We have a policing culture which unashamedly - indeed almost boastfully - entraps people speeding on wide new roads, yet ignores their far more lethal conduct on country roads. Thus young male drivers - who are the primary cause of death in traffic crashes - know they can drive down tiny country roads and not worry about being stopped and breathalysed or prosecuted for speeding. This is as certain as the date on which Christmas falls. Quite as bad as the almost universal failure to police country roads at night is the speed limit on those roads of 60 m.p.h. - which was introduced by Michael Smith, and which is often twice the safe speed for many such roads. Moreover, to many young men, the term "speed limit" does not mean the maximum speed at which they may drive but the recommended minimum.
Road deaths are slipping out of control again, and all policy initiatives are bound hand and foot by bureaucratic red tape and organisational inertia. Garda SWAT teams in full body-armour are meanwhile closing down alcohol-free discotheques for teenagers, even as young men without driving licences are elsewhere getting drunk, and nightly speeding on back-roads that are guaranteed garda-free.
If the Garda Commissioner could actually hear what plain people think about his force, he would be seeking an infinitely more popular career, and becoming a Christian Brother.