The appointment of Gay Byrne as chairman of the Road Safety Authority is a stroke of genius. Those who dismiss the idea because of his lack of experience or expertise (a majority, if we are to judge by the letters page of this newspaper) could not be more wrong, writes John Waters
Road carnage is not a technical problem, but a project of the imagination. I can think of no other individual, apart from Bono or Bob Geldof, who could make anything like the same connection as Gaybo with the national imagination.
Because of his age and because he has been largely out of the public eye for nearly a decade, he will not connect with everyone, and there is a plausible case to be made that he will not connect at all with the most significant group in the context of driver behaviour - young men.
But his appointment is a good start and, if followed through correctly, may well have something of the desired effect.
The only hope of reducing road deaths resides in making a connection with motorists sitting behind their steering wheels. The making of a negative connection, in the sense of emphasising penalties for driver transgressions, has already failed. Random breath-testing, penalty points and speed traps have a part to play, but it is a minor part and may in some respects be counter-productive. The greatest challenge is to engage the imaginations of motorists with the idea that their behaviour is the critical element in reducing road deaths.
If Gay Byrne can communicate to drivers that, together, we are embarking upon a national project to save our own lives and those of our fellow citizens, and that the route to this is the improvement and perfecting of our driving skills and behaviour, he will succeed.
His role demands, in other words, a massive emphasis on carrot rather than stick. If the psyche of the motoring public is allowed to revert to a simple points-evasion mentality, the results will be minimal.
The whole point of penalty points was to provide drivers with a motivation to improve their driving behaviour. A clear sheet would be a badge of honour, a mounting points total a red alert indicating a slide from the path of righteousness.
When points were first introduced back in 2002, there was an immediate and dramatic improvement in driver behaviour, followed by an appreciable reduction in road deaths.
At that time, I remember, there developed an entirely new pattern of driving, with observance of, for example, speed limits bordering on the excessive. This was accompanied by a genuine mood of good humour, bringing to mind the camaraderie that existed between followers of the Irish soccer team under Jack Charlton, when we developed a reputation for having the "best-behaved fans in the world".
This pattern continued into the following year, but was gradually eroded as time went by. The conventional wisdom is that the erosion set in because of low levels of enforcement. I believe that drivers reverted to their old habits because the imaginative connection was damaged by the wrong kind of enforcement. What is required here is not so much punishment as inspiration. The chief obstacle confronting Gay Byrne is the culture of traffic policing. Too many gardaí seem to regard motorists as a foe to be baited and trapped, rather than as an entity to be engaged constructively in a project of mutual self-improvement.
The penalty points system has failed not because of poor enforcement but because traffic policing has been reduced to a form of underhand revenue collection. Instead of concentrating on sections of roadway where accidents actually happen, gardaí are to be found skulking in lay-bys and hollows in the hope of catching out drivers who have strayed a kilometre or two over the speed limit.
This behaviour destroyed the initial spirit of public consciousness that followed the introduction of the points system, shifting the focus of motorists back from public-spiritedness to a battle-of-wits with traffic police.
The introduction today of a range of 31 new offences qualifying for penalty points will undoubtedly cause this damaging pattern to escalate. Senior gardaí are already beating their chests and talking about "zero tolerance", and one senior officer was quoted last week as saying that the new offences could mean that a driver might drop a full complement of 12 points in a single journey from Dublin to Cork.
If this is possible the system is bound to fail, since the stated purpose of penalty points was to give drivers a fright, while at the same time affording them a chance to mend their ways.
Yet again, drivers will expend most of their energy in a battle of wits with the gardaí.
The inconsistent and irrational loading of the points system will not help much either.
From today, drivers who stray into a cycle lane will incur the same penalty as those who drive the wrong way around a roundabout. Each of these offences will cost you one point.
Did you ever hear anything more stupid? Gaybo has his work cut out for him.