Ground Hog Day, if you recall, is a film in which the hero wakes up repeatedly to experience the same day, during which everybody he meets will say and do the same things. He alone has the power to change the routine of that day until nightfall. But he always wakes to the same day, day after day, with the same routine, the same plot, endlessly, unless interrupted by him.
We are living in such a film about such a day: Road Hog Day, in which carnage will certainly happen unless we choose to stop it. We have not yet chosen to; and so each week we must contemplate a film script containing an entirely predictable and wholly avoidable harvest of bloodshed which, like the hero in Ground Hog Day, we have the power to prevent.
The most extraordinary feature of this horror film is that the Government seems to have no feelings about the perfectly needless loss of life it entails. Two Departments - Justice and Environment - should be engaged in responding to the calamity which now awaits at least half-a-dozen people a week, yet there is nothing. Nothing. It is as if as we live in a republic of Naziesque insensitivity, and the crushed, the dismembered, the shattered who weekly are scraped from roads and wiped off car seats are no more than mere untermenschen.
Government policy
We have surrendered our regard for human beings in exchange for the right to drive fast, to govern badly, to police ineptly, to judge irresolutely. We can blame no beef baron, no idle employee of the blood transfusion service, no supermarket chief.
Government policy towards roads, cars and road accidents has been idle and incompetent because we wanted it to be. We even had a State-aided buy-a-car scheme, while allowing any number of fools, with only marginal training, little sense of danger and no fear of the law loose on badly surfaced, badly sign posted and badly cambered roads, with only marginal penalties for those who transgress the law.
Would lorry drivers, who are involved in a disproportionate number of road deaths, be rather more careful if they knew that to exceed the speed limit would cost them their cab, their licence, their livelihood and a £5,000 fine? Would any of us go at the breakneck speeds we do - and I do - if we felt that the certain consequence of being caught was the confiscation of the car, the loss of a licence for at least a year and a ruinous fine?
We have created a bizarre and illogical legal world in which the mature and sensible driver going at 30 m.p.h. after a couple of pints will, if caught, feel the full rigour of the law, be banned from the roads, be forced to re-sit his test, and face punitive insurance costs.
Country in uproar?
But speed, the real killer, is treated like a kindergarten spat. How can we have allowed the law to become so lop-sided, so grotesque, as to lose sight of the major cause of homicide in this state? How many lunatic drivers have been before the courts, only to be released with slaps across the wrist? Was the fine young gentleman who, with a blood alcohol reading of 202 milligrams per 100 millilitres, drove his car at over 100 m.p.h. into a lorry killing six people ever before the court for driving offences? What happened to him there?
Each weekend it is the same: seven killed last weekend, including two sisters and a seven-year-old daughter (and spare a thought for that family in the long and horrifying years of bereavement ahead); and 22 killed last month in a single week. Would the country not be in uproar if such killings had been caused by terrorists or drug pushers?
Probably. And that courageous crusader for right, justice and virtue, Zero Tolerance O'Donoghue, would undoubtedly have struck.
But the absolutism of ZT is suspended when it comes to the beloved motor, for we have developed a sick and consensual tolerance of car-crash killings: we go on and on about Bloody Sunday and Enniskillen and Jerry McCabe, sins of commission, and ignore the no less monstrous sins of omission which result in our roadway Golgotha.
Sins of omission
For quantity can alter the quality of sin. Sins of omission, after assured repetition, inevitably become sins of commission. By not doing something to stop the killings we know will happen on the roads we eventually become accomplices. That is why we are in this horror-film, Road Hog Day. Each day we wake up knowing some fool - probably young and male - will get behind the wheel of his car, and feeling sure that the consequences of speeding will be minimal, will during the day kill himself and maybe a brace of others.
This is the film. The Government, led by brave, swashbuckling Z.T. O'Donoghue, could if it wanted introduce a legal tariff in which speeding will mandatorily - no ifs or buts - cause the loss of licence, the confiscation of the car or lorry and the payment of a huge fine. The Garda Siochana cannot fight this war if the courts remain in a condition of asinine supinity. Those who speed should be off the road, and professional drivers should lose their careers. It's that simple. It's time to change the plot.