What is the continuing Big Lie in virtually all analyses of our appalling level of fatal vehicle crashes? What is the Big Lie which has dominated all discussion about deaths on the road? What is the Big Lie which makes a reasoned and reasonable response to the continuing calamity befalling so many families virtually impossible?
The Big Lie is this: that deaths on the road are largely attributable to drunk drivers. Stop drunk driving, and you effectively stop mass homicide on our roads. This is a falsehood. It is the magic wand solution to complex problems, but it has some attractive features which make it almost irresistible to the buying public.
For it suggests that fatal accidents are not caused by most of us. They are caused by nasty, irresponsible people who take too much to drink and then go around killing people. And this is a very comfortable theory indeed. It comes pre-packaged with the idea that fatal accidents are things experienced by other people. And this is where the Big Lie is at its most insidious, because the other side of the Big Lie is that in blaming this distinct and separate group, as remote from the rest of us as Martians, we excuse ourselves from blame.
Drunk drivers
We, the theory goes, do not cause road crashes. Drunks - feckless, irresponsible, abominable, horrible people - cause crashes. People die because of them.
And this is quite untrue. This would not matter if people behaved responsibly on the roads; but all the evidence at our disposal is that we are passing through an epidemic of irresponsibility, in which all common sense has been jettisoned to make way for impatience, and fear of consequence has been replaced by complete fearlessness. I'm okay. I haven't had a drink. I'm a good driver. And our speed limits are a joke.
Let us look at the figures. At the time of writing, nearly 50 people have died on our roads in 40 days. We hear that 20 of the fatal accidents were due to speed, and nine were caused by drunk drivers. Neither is true. All of them, without exception, were due to speed. Nobody ever died in a car that was travelling at one mile an hour; and everywhere, in towns and cities and especially down country lanes, we are driving far too fast.
No doubt nine of the deaths were drink-related - but that doesn't necessarily mean that the driver was drunk. Fourteen of this year's dead were pedestrians, and some of those were clearly the worse for wear. But in the woolly high-mindedness of virtually all conversation about road homicide, "alcohol-related deaths" translates as drunk drivers, never drunk pedestrians.
When the utter insanity of harnessing drink-driving with rising road deaths began to take legal form nearly five years ago with Michael Smith's Road Traffic Bill - that brilliantly devised piece of law which punished the mildly over the limit with the same unflinching and absolutist severity as the blindly, roaring drunk - the Minister said the legislation was necessary because of the 400 people a year being killed on the roads.
No complete figures
A magic and imagined linkage, for though there were no complete figures for the relationship between road deaths and alcohol consumption - surely a vital prerequisite before one frames laws to deal with such matters - there were clues. For example, in 1992 8,000 people were injured in two-car collisions. Only 265 of those people were injured in accidents in which a participant had been drinking alcohol. Similarly, only in five of 358 fatal two-car accidents had drink been taken.
Since the Minister - who has since been punished in this life rather than the next by being made Minister for bankrupting the State - intoned those figures of 400 dead due to drink-driving, our death toll has risen by 25 per cent to 500. I said then that the basis for the new law was intellectually contemptible. It has turned out to be morally contemptible too.
Yet each Christmas since then, we have had the same dreary farce of thousands of people inching their way through road-blocks to check whether or not they have had a glass of wine too many, consuming thousands and thousands of garda-hours: hours which are not then spent patrolling the roads during the rest of the year.
Gardai are not to blame for this. Our politicians are mouthpieces of political will. When politicians spout gibberish, and get away with it, as Michael Smith did five years ago, it is because people want to hear gibberish. What they do not want is to have their own right to drive at speed curtailed. Give me consoling gibberish, please. Blame drunk drivers, not me. I'm okay.
Deplorable truth
The truth is, I'm not okay. It is people who say, I'm okay, who cause accidents, who kill. Chief Superintendent John O'Brien, head of the Garda Traffic Bureau, is probably reporting a deplorable truth when he says that road safety strategies in other countries have taken up to five years to have an effect.
Sorry. We haven't five years. This year our road accident figures per head of population will exceed those of the US; they will vastly exceed those of the US if you judge them by deaths per vehicle-miles. In other words, we cannot wait for the normal processes of learning to occur. They take too long.
For years, the Garda Siochana has worked on the principle of affable consent and, generally speaking, that was right. There is probably no more decent, honest and less corruptible force in Europe. The result is that we do not fear them.
It is time we did. Consensual and gradual education will take years to have an impact. Much more immediate in its effect is the old Christian Brother method of learning: terror. If speeding meant loss of licence, we would not speed. If not indicating meant a £500 fine, we would indicate. Have we the political will to halt the great scandal of this State, the death toll on the roads? The following is an anagram of the answer: On.