Accident: an event that is without a cause or unexpected, esp. one causing injury or damage. OED. The word "accident" was widely used to describe the catastrophic collision in Slane, which nearly wiped out an entire family last week. It is not merely the wrong word; it is a lie. It is an outrageous, monstrous lie, one we repeat constantly in our description of what is happening on our roads.
For the slaughter we cheerily tolerate on our highways doesn't consist of a series of unexpected events without cause. And while I make no judgment whatever on the culpability of the driver who has been charged with dangerous driving following the disaster in Slane, I can make judgments on the road there. It is dreadful.
It is, apparently, the policy of our National Roads Authority that a primary route to the north west, bearing a vast amount of heavy freight vehicles, must pass in either direction down an extremely steep hill before turning at right-angles over a narrow one-way bridge. It is the policy of our National Roads Authority that this should be the case indefinitely, for no by-pass is planned for Slane, even though a single phone call to the local gardai, who are almost witless in despair, would have told them about the fundamental perils of the road.
Control zone
Not that the National Roads Authority must alone accept responsibility for what happens at Slane. The creation of a control zone of 20 mph for a mile on either side of the hill and bridge, with large and frequent warning signs, monitored by cameras and with a ruthless policy of enforcement, with a guaranteed arrest by the gardai could have eliminated most of the unaccidental accidents which make the village of Slane well named, if not well-spelt.
Frankly, I'm sick of writing about this, sick of reading about the needless deaths on the roads, sick of following the personal tragedy each road fatality must entail, not just that week, or even that month, but for the rest of the lives of their loved ones. Such a severance, violent, unexpected, and with catastrophic emotional, pschychological and financial consequences can distort and blight childhoods, and turn radiant young wives into ashen, broken widows, or young husbands into distraught, home-making widowers. This we tolerate; worse, this we create.
In that creation, and in the absence of accidentality, we are left with a terminological hole to describe this slaughter. Since we know that vehicles will crash and lorries career out of control at certain locations on certain roads, yet we do nothing to prevent these events, we have departed from all previous experiences of the English language.
We are thus wordless to describe events which are neither murder in the legal sense, not simple manslaughter; they exist instead in a verbal limbo where words have no real meaning. So we divest such events of all meaning and call them accidents, in violation both of language, of common sense and of manifest causality.
Non-accidents
These hideous events occur because our roads and the signs upon them are so constructed that non-accidental death upon them is sooner or later certain. We all of us can name at least one dangerous one piece of road near where we live, where non-accidental accidents are frequent, yet nothing is done about them. A friend who lives near such a stretch of road, where crashes are frequent, asked for the erection of that curiously hibernian talisman of imminent danger, a black spot sign, which, if you are even dimmer than the people who erect our signs and can't identify a Black Spot on sight, also explains in writing that it is a Black Spot.
He was told by a garda officer that a spot can only receive the accolade of a circle of perilous negritude if three people have been killed there, and not before. Thus three gallant, selfless lives must be squandered before a place is officially listed as dangerous.
But where has this punctinigral notion of road signage, unique in the world, come from? Was its inventor a devotee of Treasure Island? And does the State really really think that its duty towards road-users is discharged once it has erected a sign bearing Blind Pugh's warning either side of a regular rendez-vous with murderous mayhem? Is that it? Is duty thus discharged, so lightly, so frivolously by erecting a black spot and calling it, Black Spot? Is this not simply public cretinism masquerading as policy?
Negligence
Frivolity is the key to our roads policy - frivolity in exhaustive and inventive detail, too numerous and complex to describe: the badly marked exits, the misleading exit stripes, the complete lack of destination signposts anywhere, and with even new roads using two measurement systems, distances in metric, speeds in imperial. How is it possible that such a culture of negligence survives in the public domain, when in private industry, such behaviour would see managing directors in jail, and companies bankrupted by fines?
So why was the driving examiners' union allowed to restrict the number of driving examiners to be appointed? Why have untested drivers been allowed to drive unaccompanied? (Because they have provisional licences, meaning licensed to kill, as in Provisional IRA?) Why have party leaders not agreed a common policy which would demand that only fully licensed drivers may drive unaccompanied, thereby finally ending a scandal which has cost scores of lives?
Why? Because, I suppose, these people simply died in accidents.