It would be logical - would it not? - to assume that when the 100,000 people in the Republic waiting to sit their driving tests are finally tested, there will accordingly be 100,000 new and unaccompanied drivers on the road. Ah; would that it were that simple. Drivers with provisional licences can already get into a car on their 17th birthday and drive away, though they possess the automotive skills of a dog, have the eyesight of a mole, and the intelligence of a car-jack. Merely the possession of a provisional licence, for which no test whatsoever is required, enables anyone to sit behind the wheel of a ton or two of moving metal and vanish into the wild blue yonder or the casualty wing of St Vincent's Hospital.
Unqualified drivers
"It is highly irresponsible of the deputy to suggest that, because a person holds a provisional licence, there is a danger to people travelling on the road," puffed Bobby Molloy indignantly the other day to Brian Hayes TD, who had had the outrageous temerity to suggest that having so many unqualified drivers on the road was having a detrimental effect on road safety. Well spoken Minister! Stand by the right of the untested, the untrained, the unskilled, the unqualified to be free to drive however they want on our roads. To suggest that driving requires specially learned techniques which are difficult to master is clearly absurd.
We should all take a leaf from the book of the driver of a pickup truck who was recently (and by our standards wholly wickedly) arrested by police in the Argentinian city of Trelew. He was completely blind. However, he had the visual skills of his 13-year-old daughter in the passenger seat to assist him. "The blind man was driving fairly well, although he made some pretty abrupt manoeuvres which attracted the attention of a patrol car," a police spokesman said.
I see. And this is what passes for freedom in Argentina, is it? A chap can't go out driving with his daughter without the heavy hand of the fuzz descending on the shoulder? Caramba! Thank God we order these things better in Ireland, and have done ever since that golden day 20 years ago when Sylvester Barrett, Bobby Molloy's illustrious predecessor, blazed a path for liberty by declaring that anyone who had had two provisional licences could claim a full licence without doing a test. That is to say, people who had repeatedly sat tests, and who had scared generations of testers into gibbering witlessness by their utter and incontrovertible proof that they were incapable of driving, were, without more ado, now entitled to drive unaccompanied.
Unfortunate collision
So Prudence Entwhistle, that venerable granny from Kingstown who had first yearned to drive when watching the Gordon Bennett rally in 1903, and had been sitting tests since the time gels got the vote, failing every year since, suddenly realised her hour had come. She could leave behind her that unfortunate collision involving a crocodile of girls from Holy Child Killiney (but how pretty the massed wreaths had looked!). And the unlucky occasion when she'd chosen reverse instead of first and had backed into the day-trip of the pensioners from the Kingstown and District Presbyterian Sewing Club, crushing five - now mere history! And as for the time when the driving instructor had vaulted out of the car, even though they were bowling along at 70 m.p.h. northward on the southbound lane of the Naas dual carriageway? Lord, how she laughed. Prudence's heirs are everywhere to this day, and they have, thank God, their defender in Bobby Molloy. The freedom-loving spirit of Sylvester Barrett and Prudence Entwhistle still informs so much of our attitude to roads and driving. We still erect road-signs which employ two measurement systems, metric for distance and imperial for speed, but sell cars whose meters measure distance in imperial only. About half of our drivers think the outside lane is for having a good natter in, with maybe the possibility of a right turn in about 20 miles, oops, 38 kilometres', meanwhile continuing the conversation with the hand gestures of a Neopolitan knitter.
Roundabouts
Fully 10 per cent of drivers either think that signalling on roundabouts is a frivolous waste of energy, or even worse, they indicate in the wrong direction (the most common error being to indicate left simply because one inevitably turns left on entering the roundabout, and then leaving the indicator on during the jolly circumnavigation which follows).
A vast body of laws seem never to be enforced at all. How many JCBs have roadplates on? If they are not registered to be on the road, they cannot then in law be insured. When has any JCB making its stately passage down the centre of the road, without road tax or insurance, ever been stopped and its driver prosecuted? When has the cheery dumper truck which zips platelessly all over the President's highway ever been flagged to the side of the road and its operator been given a touch of the Argentinian treatment?
Never. It doesn't happen. We live in Barrettland, its principles of freedom stoutly defended to this day by Bobby Molloy. By Jove, sir, it makes you proud. And sometimes dead.