It seems I've been writing about the needless death toll on our roads since Rolls met Royce. In that time, the numbers killed have remorselessly risen, and we seem utterly unwilling to stop it, writes Kevin Myers.
At the most obvious level, in our policing and in our courts, we are failing. We are failing the dead, those about to die and all their families as they plummet into the worst days of their lives. Eddie Shaw, chairman of the National Safety Council, recently told an Oireachtas committee of the wholly unnecessary death toll: 144 killed this year so far and 1,200 injured.
God knows how he got those statistics. A rather simpler statistic was provided by Assistant Garda Commissioner Edward Rock: that there were 9,050 drink-driving arrests up to September 30th this year. A nice round figure, as it happens, because that means there were a fraction over 1,000 arrests a month, or 250 a week. Which comes to 9.6 per county per week. Or, if you like, 1.4 arrests per day per county. Or better still, one arrest for drink-driving every 17 hours, per county.
When I wrote on the absence of visible policing on the N81 last January, Supt Kevin Donoghue of the Garda Press Office, in a letter to this paper, offered what the poor fellow apparently imagined was a rebuttal. He said "the roadway in question stretches a total of 55 kilometres and is policed, both covertly and overtly, by a number of Garda districts and units 24 hours a day. For the year 2004, the total number of Garda checkpoints on this roadway was 462." In other words, 1.26 roadblocks per day over fully 55 kilometres - that included them all, visible and invisible. I'd be surprised if each one lasted much over an hour. Let's be generous: allow an hour and a half per roadblock. In other words, out of the nearly 11,100 hours of 2004, the N81 had roadblocks deployed for around just 693 of them; thus the N81 had no road-blocks on it for 93 per cent of the time.
Supt Donoghue also triumphantly declared, as if it were some astounding vindication, that there had been some 35 drink-driving arrests on the N81 in 2004 - or, if you like, just one for every 13 roadblocks. Put another way, a drunk-driver was found on the entire 55-kilometre length of the extremely busy N81 just once every ten-and-a-half days. My. What sober folk live in Wicklow.
Now, these dismal figures are not the headline-making revelations of a brilliant investigative journalist, but the boastful declarations of the superintendent of the Garda Press Office. Yet instead of attacking me, as he did in a highly personal and dismally self-defeating letter, a more talented press officer than Supt Donoghue would have provided the real explanation for the lack of policing on the N81, namely, a lack of police.
As I discovered when I needed An Garda Síochána earlier on this year, there simply weren't any officers available. Not even the most efficient individuals can be in five places at the one time, which is what is now expected of rural gardaí.
Let's look at the figures in a rather simplistic, but impressionistic way.
There are 12,000 gardaí in Ireland. Excluding overtime, each works around 310 days a year. But it takes three gardaí working eight-hour shifts to provide a full 24-hour coverage per day. So in this theoretical abstract, there are only 4,000 gardaí available for duty at any one time, and taking into account annual leave, that works out at 3,400. But we have a population of over four million: which means there is a Garda officer on duty for every 1,200 of us: and every time a crash attracts the attentions of, say, 10 gardaí, 12,000 of us are left without any Garda cover at all.
In other words, we are so short of gardaí that you would have to be a desperately stupid or an astoundingly unlucky drunk driver anywhere in Ireland to be caught by the guards. Thus large tracts of rural roadway are now, even by the boastful declarations emanating from the Garda Press Office, effectively without policing. All over the country, drivers are getting tanked up and then weaving their way home in the early hours, knowing they need have little fear of roadblocks. It needed a catastrophic series of fatal crashes in Donegal before a Garda traffic unit was finally established on the Inishowen Peninsula last month But of course, as we know, people are sometimes caught drink-driving, as Vincent McCormick was last December, but only after he had killed two people - father of two Martin Connor, and mother of three Theresa Smith.
The killer was so drunk that he had already unknowingly hit one other car, forcing it off the road.
McCormick briefly appeared before Roscommon Circuit Court last week, to receive a €2,000 fine and a 10-year ban on driving, before walking free, with no jail sentence, suspended or otherwise.
Such a derisory punishment faithfully reflects the politically correct and bankrupt morality of this State.
A year ago two pub owners, Ronan Lawless and Kieran Levanzin, were fined a total of €6,400, with another €3,000 in costs, nearly €5,000 each, merely for smoking on their own premises, and allowing others to do likewise.
Leave a pub and drunkenly slaughter two innocent people: a €2,000 fine.
But stay in the pub, light up a fag and it will cost you €5,000. Sick, sick, sick.