The Garda approach appears to be one of entrapment - motoristsare perceived as a kind of prey, writes John Waters
If a solution was to be proposed which promised to ameliorate any kind of social difficulty you can imagine, but which still involved the deaths of eight or nine people every week, then clearly such a proposal would be rejected out of hand.
Yet, such a "solution" already exists in the form of the motor car. If anything else was killing over 400 citizens a year, we would ban it outright. But because road traffic deaths occur as a collateral aspect of the use of this highly convenient form of transport, we have a different attitude towards such fatalities than to deaths attributable to other clear-cut and demonstrably avoidable causes. We could decide that the motor car was too dangerous, but this is a price we're not prepared to pay.
There is, then, a trade-off between risk and convenience which is rarely acknowledged in a discussion which, for all its high-minded piety, is governed by a callous pragmatism with regard to the individual suffering resulting from society's high dependence on road transport.
There remains, as a result, an unstated assumption that there is some acceptable level of road carnage, that the best we can hope for is a reduction in the numbers of deaths. Given our unwillingness to rethink fundamentally our relationship with the motor car, this may be the best we can do. But our ambivalences may also be preventing us from minimising the suffering.
A motor car is a lethal weapon, and there is a crying need to bring this consciousness to the forefront of the mind of every driver as he or she gets behind a steering wheel.
The introduction of a penalty points system for certain motoring offences is a step in the right direction. That offences like speeding and drink-driving will henceforth attract penalty points leading to a mandatory suspension if a certain threshold is broken sends a clear signal that having charge of a motor vehicle is an extremely onerous responsibility. However, the legislation remains infected by the ambivalence I've identified, which expresses itself in several quite serious drawbacks.
The main one is that the penalty for the relevant offences will comprise a combination of points and a fine. This approach is unlikely to work.
The old system, whereby, for example, speeding motorists were subjected to on-the-spot fines, was both inequitable and ineffective, being skewed in favour of the well-off motorist. In addition to the inequity, this ensured that the deterrent value of fines was least effective where, arguably, it was most required.
That the system will continue to apply fines is to be regretted as an opportunity missed. Far more effective would be a simple two-strikes-and-you're-out system, whereby the second offence within a 12-month period would incur a mandatory disqualification.
That traffic offences continue to be a source of public revenues has the effect of perpetuating the national ambivalence towards the risks associated with motoring and channelling it even more dangerously into the relationship between the motorist and those authorities charged with maintaining order on the public roads.
If road deaths represent such a serious calamity for this society - and they do - and if speeding and drink-driving have been identified as a major contributory factor - and they have - then the idea that such offences represent an opportunity for revenue collection is as unacceptable as would any proposal for a tax on manslaughter. If we are serious about reducing fatalities, we will have to choose between this objective and seeing the roads as a locus of tax-collection.
The system as currently operated is both arbitrarily severe on motorists and insufficiently emphatic with regard to the seriousness of speeding offences. The approach of An Garda Síochána appears to be one of entrapment, whereby motorists are perceived as a kind of prey in a game of pursuit and pounce. Rarely are speed checks placed where there is a real record of accidents, but usually on stretches of road which, by virtue of being open and wide, present a high scalp-count.
The sense is that the authorities are in search of easy prey rather than genuinely seeking to reduce accidents. Irish motorists, far from seeking to co-operate in reducing road accidents, harbour resentments about what they perceive not as a regime dedicated to protecting road-users, but as a form of tax-collection. This leads to the trivialisation of speeding offences, reducing them to a kind of game between motorists and traffic police.
Given the inefficient system of detection, an average motorist given to moderate breaches of the speeding regulations will be caught perhaps two or three times a year. Each detected speeding offence will be subject to a penalty of two points, together with a fixed charge of €80. This average speed-hound will have to become only marginally more vigilant to enable him or her to continue to break the law and yet remain within the 12-point limit over any three-year period.
Thus, the official coffers will be enhanced by the €30 million or so garnered annually from such fines, the motorist will go on nudging at the limits of the law, and the carnage will go on.