Gay Byrne, new chairman of the Road Safety Authority, may be an inspired choice to persuade people of the need for change, writes Conor Faughnan
Martin Cullen surprised a lot of people this week with the appointment of Gay Byrne to chair the new Road Safety Authority. It may not have been the first name that came to many people's minds, but it just might turn out to be an inspired choice.
Gay Byrne is an icon of Irish public life. After a long career as by far the country's most influential broadcaster, he continues to be a charismatic and powerful influence on public opinion. He also comes free of baggage.
Road safety is an area that has suffered over the years from the curse of the committee. It is such a pervasive crisis that it runs across Government departments and functions. It is everyone's fault and no one's; somewhere on everyone's to-do list, but at the top of no one's.
Hence you have gardaí pointing to deficiencies in the law, engineers pointing at planners, insurance companies complaining about gardaí, everyone asking for resources and everyone full of views on what others need to do.
This Coalition can take some credit for being the first Government to actually produce a road-safety strategy with measurable targets and objectives.
However, its apparent inability to implement its own strategy has caused a lot of people to lose confidence - most notably the former chairman of the National Safety Council, who resigned in protest just before Christmas.
It was not hard to see his point. Some of the features of Irish road use are scandalous. The levels of enforcement on Irish roads are abysmal. There are approximately 9,500 people charged with drink-driving every year, which is about two people for every three pubs in the land. Almost half of those caught walk away unpunished because of weak legislation and legal challenges.
The arrival of the penalty points system could have been a watershed, and initially it appeared that it would be, but enforcement remained poor.
Proper computerisation of the system has been delayed for years and the numbers of speeding detections are actually down by some 40 per cent on what was in place before the penalty points system was introduced. And again, it is everyone's fault and no one's.
It seems that good intentions, and good budgets, are not enough. Almost like a crumple-zone absorbing and dissipating the force of a crash, the push for safer roads is ground to a halt by the big machine of bureaucratic inertia.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the area over which the new Road Safety Authority will have direct control - the fiasco of driving-test delays, unregulated driving instructors and unenforceable laws for learners.
Martin Cullen wanted to use limited outsourcing of tests to reduce the backlog. This has been blocked by the existing testers - just over 100 of them. Over 400,000 people are on provisional licences and need driving tests, and more join the queue every day, but the answer is still "no".
Ireland has no system of registering and monitoring driving instructors. At the moment no qualification of any sort is necessary. The introduction of a statutory register is one more policy bogged down by petty arguments - in this case rivalry between the existing independent registers. Once again it's into the committee room for years of sniping and deadlock.
Underpinning all of this, and the root cause of the whole malaise, is an Irish culture of careless road use and ambivalence towards the law.
As a nation we don't care to be over-policed. We all oppose drink-driving yet the Garda lacks the social mandate and support required to set up checkpoints in pub car-parks.
Into this mess comes Gay Byrne. His role will be two-fold. Firstly, he will need to articulate and reinforce to the country as a whole the need to support road-safety measures and demand better standards.
His will be a moral voice, and especially necessary when potentially unpopular measures like random breath-testing and speed cameras are established. To my mind there is no one better suited to that task.
Secondly, he will need to hold the Government to its promises. As Martin Cullen knows well, it can be dangerous for a politician to provide hostages to fortune, in the way that he has with this appointment. The Minister is to be commended for his courage in doing so. It is not often that an incoming chairman includes a threat to resign in his acceptance speech, but Gay Byrne did just that. He made it clear that he will step down if he feels Mr Cullen and his colleagues are not doing enough.
The danger is that despite the best intentions of Gay Byrne, and indeed of Martin Cullen, so much of what has to be done lies outside their control. But for now I am inclined to be optimistic.
Asking Uncle Gaybo, with his calm and dulcet tones, to champion the cause of road safety is an imaginative choice.
It just might work.
Conor Faughnan is public-affairs manager at AA Ireland