Garda PSV inspector Sgt Patrick Donovan should watch out. He is clearly a conscientious, imaginative, hard-working, intelligent man of outstanding integrity, writes Kevin Myers.
All of which suggests he will soon be directing traffic on Sceilig Micheál, with his days as a PSV inspector at an end.
Nicole Naumburger, a German au pair, was pushing a buggy, with little Maeve aboard, on Main Street in Carrigaline last February, when she stopped to let a car exit a car-park. (It says something about current values that the car-driver did not stop and absolutely insist that the girl and the buggy enjoy priority.)
Nicole then tried to cross the exit as a lorry approached. CCTV footage clearly shows Nicole waving at the lorry with one hand and pulling the buggy with the other. The truck did not stop, but slowly turned right, with Nicole on its left-hand side.
Nicole vainly tried to attract the driver's attention, but the lorry nonetheless continued. In the last gallant moments of Nicole's young life, she managed to push the buggy and Maeve clear of the lorry, before the front wheel of the lorry crushed her to death.
Pat Donovan was given the task of examining the lorry after this appalling, needless death. It was - perhaps unusually for an Irish lorry - roadworthy in all respects. However, on the front passenger seat were resting a heap of cardboard boxes, and on the left-hand side of the dashboard sat a baseball hat.
Pat Donovan then did some tests on the driver's ability to see on the left-hand side of the vehicle. He discovered that because of the boxes and the cap, an outside object had to be 1.72 metres off the ground before it became visible to the driver.
Nicole was 1.65 metres tall.
So, presuming the boxes and the hat were present at the time, the driver had driven a vehicle on to a public street with such unnaturally restricted vision that he could not see anyone under 1.72 metres - that is, the vast majority of people and au pairs in this country. Yet he was not summonsed to appear in the coroner's court, merely requested to attend - which he did not. Moreover, the coroner ruled that the driver's statement, taken by gardaí, added nothing to further the enquiry.
Did anyone ask the driver why he was driving a lorry which had such voluntarily and fatally impaired visibility on the left-hand side that he could not see a medium-sized German? And why did the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, with all this evidence available to it of needless obstruction of the line of sight, plus of course one dead au pair, decide that this case was not worth a prosecution? Thus there will be no trial, and we will forget Nicole Naumburger, just as we have forgotten the cyclist Julia Potterton, who three years ago was killed by a lorry turning left at the Aston Quay-O'Connell Bridge junction in Dublin. The coroner's court was told by the driver that he could not have seen Julia if she was ahead of his front mirrors.
So even when the driver's vision is not in any way impaired by anything other than the blind-spots created by the design of the lorry itself, we are allowing lorries free access to mix with cyclists and pedestrians. How is this possible? Why are lorries not equipped by law with mirrors or video cameras to tell the drivers that they are half-a-second away from turning a walking human being into a flattened piece of steak tartare? This tells us one thing, which we already know: that this is a haulier's paradise. Moreover, whatever limited laws supposedly govern the behaviour of lorry drivers are hardly ever applied. Simply, we have too few Pat Donovans. Certainly there was not a Pat Donovan in sight on the N81 into Dublin the other day, when I counted more than 20 clearly overladen sand and gravel lorries, with their loads heaped above the level of the sides of the vehicles, and illegally unrestrained by covers. These vehicles were shedding blinding miasmas of wet muck and shrapnel-blasts of gravel on to the vehicles behind them.
The N81 is the main route from the Wicklow Klondike of sand and gravel pits into Dublin. Hundreds of lorries pass this way every day. Yet there are never - never - any Garda roadblocks to put a halt to this systematic and potentially lethal criminality. Why is this? What justification can there be for it? Where are our other Pat Donovans? Naturally, once I got into Dublin, I had to drive around three separate lorries unloading on double yellow lines, with their hazard warning lights flashing, as if that provided some immunity to the law, which of course it doesn't.
Lorry-drivers consistently flout the law because they know they can. They know they won't be punished. They know that they can, without legal consequence, paralyse an entire town - even Dublin - with their illegal parking, just as they know they can jeopardise the safety of other road users with their overladen lorries cascading filth everywhere, just as they know they can apparently kill pedestrians and cyclists with impunity. For it is now effectively the legal duty of their potential victims to escape the lorries, not for the drivers to eradicate their own blind spots. And if they do kill you on foot or bike, there'll be no trial, and they'll be allowed to continue to drive their lethal mobile blind spots - because it was your fault for being too small.