Road death figures often overshadow the silent victims: those injured on Ireland's roads, writes Ciaran Brennan
THE HIGHWAYS jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive. Those words from Bruce Springsteen's 1975 song have a haunting familiarity in Ireland of today.
The carnage on Ireland's roads claims the lives of many motorists, pedestrians and cyclists from all walks of life, but a disproportionate number of road casualties are young men, many on a last-chance power drive to impress their peers.
"Seventeen to 24-year-old men account for one in five driver deaths but represent a mere 6 per cent of the population. They are significantly over-represented on this basis, said a spokeswoman for the Road Safety Authority (RSA).
The over-representation of young people -particularly young males - in road accidents is a recognised phenomenon in many countries.
Statistics suggest that young male drivers have been the biggest obstacle to reducing annual deaths caused in road accidents in Australia, despite years of public safety campaigns costing millions of dollars.
Even mandatory seat-belt legislation, random breath-testing, and the proliferation of red-light and speed cameras have failed to dissuade young men from driving dangerously.
The RSA recently revealed that men aged between 17 and 25 are seven times more likely to die on our roads than anyone else.
There is a consensus among many dealing with road safety, including the RSA, that young men can both under-estimate danger while driving and over-estimate their driving ability and skill.
Headlines focus primarily on road deaths, but for every person killed on the roads in Ireland there are estimated to be another eight to 10 who lie injured in the trauma wards of hospitals.
"It is the untold stories that come our way in general, the survivors that come out of the accidents and make their way to the neurosurgical units," explains Dr Mark Delargy, consultant at the National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH) in Dún Laoghaire. "Sometimes their saga gets told but I think society is nearly able to bear the grief of death on the roads more than it is, living with major disability."
Many of the broken heroes from Ireland's highways and by-roads find themselves in the rehabilitation hospital.
Three years ago, Delargy told the Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children that at the NRH there was an over-representation of patients who were young male drivers from a rural background injured in accidents with no other vehicle involved. Their injuries range from brain damage to spinal damage to smashed limbs. The average length of stay of a patient is three months, but many stay much longer than that.
"We have a coma recovery programme for those people who have been rendered vegetative and we run our programme all the way through to those people who are making good recovery and exploring return to work," says Delargy.
However, brain injuries can be the most difficult to deal with, he says. "There is a whole world of trauma to the brain which results in personality change and which devastates families forever because the individual becomes a different person and, as a result, is not the individual that the spouse married or is not the parent the children have got used to and the changes are very rarely for the better - they are people who are irritable, egocentric, self-focused, angry, explosive," says Delargy.
"The family walk around as if they are walking on egg shells."
An inadvertent comment to a brain-damaged person can provoke a tirade that maybe lasts the whole evening, he says.
Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond recently said that he "suffered mortally with depression" and lost all of his coping mechanisms after his 298mph crash. The presenter said he is still prone to memory loss and had damaged the part of his brain that controls spatial awareness - meaning he sometimes has trouble parking.
Some have argued that if many of the young men who think of themselves as invincible, all-knowing and invulnerable behind the wheel of a car were shown the reality of life in the NRH that this may help reduce some of the road carnage among this age group.
"Even seeing the difficulties that people experience after road traffic accidents first-hand in a professional way doesn't necessarily make all of us perfect drivers," says Delargy. "So I think there is a substantial weakness in the once-off shock treatment and the whole distasteful aspect of using individuals as guinea pigs."
However, he says he finds the RSA's current Crashed Lives advertisements effective, particularly the one featuring the man who suffered brain damage.
"What is more realistic is the voiceover of the young man we hear who sounds wrong and you suspect is not able to hold down a normal life that he wanted to with regard to sport and work and relationships," he says.
"I think that in some ways conjures up your own image or scenario and in some ways is more effective."
The Road Safety Authority says it has chosen this type of advertising to provide the victims and their families with a voice on road safety.
However, Jim Connolly, chairman of the Rural Resettlement Ireland, which runs the Safe Driving Pledge where people make a voluntary public statement that they will drive in a safe manner, says it is debatable whether the advertisements are reaching their target audience of young men and has called for introduction of driver education in secondary schools.
He says that driving instruction has already been adopted on the curriculum in some schools in the US.
"That doesn't mean that they don't have a problem but they are taking the kind of steps at an early stage so children go through driving instruction far more seriously than we do," says Connolly.