The collision point was visible from at least 160 metres away. The tyre marks began at 100. By then it was too late. The 25-year-old driver, his reflexes fatally dulled by twice the legal limit of alcohol, hit the car head on. The impact snuffed out the life of a baby boy, an only son in a family of four, and left the child's 10-year-old sister and mother grievously scarred and injured. In court, the horrific reality unfolded as evidence was given of the mother, trapped in her seat, watching the life drain from her little boy; of his father running out of the house, frantically picking up the lifeless body and desperately looking for help.
As cases of "drink-driving causing death" go, this recent one is not unusual. What makes it different is the detail of the reporting. While certain accidents get blanket coverage when they occur, the raw facts rarely feature at that stage for fear of prejudicing any ensuing court case. The problem is that by the time it gets to court, no one cares any more. So he was two/four/six times the legal limit and driving while disqualified for 10 years? He'll hardly rate a paragraph.
So, for example, only the sharp-eyed will have noted in May, that the collision which led to the death of a truck driver and paralysed his six-year-old daughter, was the work of a 43-year-old quantity surveyor, driving with three times the legal alcohol limit in his bloodstream.
Many "accidents" from recent months will end up in similar obscurity: the man who spent the day in a pub watching a match, then drove the wrong way up a road and killed a young father coming home from work; the respected professional who drunkenly crossed a continuous white line late one afternoon and killed a teenager; another professional pillar of the community who left a pub in the early hours and killed himself by hitting a wall - just days after being arrested for drunken driving, barely a year after escaping a similar charge on a technicality; the 17-year-old whose speedometer was stopped at 110 m.p.h. after he killed himself and another in a bid to break the speed record between one country town and another in a £50 banger; the articulated-lorry driver, whose reckless overtaking manoeuvre demolished a car, killing one of the passengers.
Of course, no one in that country town wants to talk about the 17-year-old. "What's there to say?" shrugs a local politician.
"He came from a decent family, they've suffered enough. It was an accident. These things happen." Doubtless, the same comment is echoing across the State about the other "accidents". This way, we never have to confront awkward questions about ourselves.
The result? Ten times as many people will be killed in road "accidents" this year than are murdered. More children will die in road "accidents" than of cancer. More young men under 25 will be killed by road "accidents" than anything else - including suicide. And the raw, shameful facts behind them all will disappear in a philosophical shrug.
But if we're good at skating over the details of the dead, we are really excellent about casting off the survivors, the great forgotten. In the great media alarms about the fatality figures, who remembers that 1,640 "serious" injuries were reported last year? "When the media hear of an accident, the great focus is on those who died," says Claire Conway, a staff nurse at the National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH), D·n Laoghaire. "But here, we think immediately of those who survive it - and how they will survive."
"Serious" in this context means that for every day last year, more than five people - mostly young - lost a limb or suffered injury to their spine or brain.
All those young people who told a recent survey that they fear paralysis more than death can relax: they are 10 times more likely to be brain-damaged than paralysed. Advances in acute care mean that many severely brain-damaged people who would have died before, can now be kept alive.
But at what a cost. Parents of brain-damaged children describe their experience as "an unrelenting bereavement"; the child they knew is gone. Such a mother described the slow dawning of the truth to a Nottingham University researcher: "This staff nurse just turned round and said, 'Oh you can forget the son that you had. You'll have another one that will emerge. A totally different Stephen'. Just like that you see. And my husband cried on the way back to the car. He said, 'I loved the one I'd got. I don't want another one'."
In the UK, it is estimated that about 15 people are taken to hospital every hour with a brain injury, the vast majority of them young men after road accidents.
We have no national trauma database, but the strike rate is undoubtedly higher here, as our road death rate is almost twice that of the UK. In 1999, there were 11 deaths from traffic accidents per 100,000 of the population in the Republic compared with six in the UK.
But we know for sure that in the NRH more than half the adult patients - nearly all young men - are there as a result of road injuries. In the children's ward, it is 70 per cent.
The ripples of brain damage extend far beyond profound personality and behavioural problems and the horror of promise unfulfilled. "We dragged him back from the brink of death," said one mother, "but I look at him now and God forgive me, I think there are worse things than dying."
Never mind. In a few months time, inquests and court cases will pass quietly and the outrage and the grieving will be left to the bereaved and the injured.
It goes without saying that we should take responsibility for our own behaviour, but we also need to demand to know why wealthy publicans continue to serve customers who've clearly had enough. Or why they charge as much for non-alcoholic drinks as for highly-taxed alcohol. Or why children continue to get alcohol without a blink.
Or why, in an alcohol-soaked culture and with an under-resourced police force, this Government saw fit to introduce even longer drinking hours within the past year, a period which has coincided with a doubling of public order offences and by inference, more drunks taking to the roads late at night.
NO ONE will question the ease with which disqualified drunk drivers may retrieve their licences halfway through the disqualification period, with no requirement to show evidence of altered behaviour.
No one will ask how the 17-year-old obtained the car or why the NCT (national car test) provisions do not include something as obvious as the supervised destruction of failed cars.
No one will pause to wonder at the kind of culture that labels the 17-year-old's behaviour an "accident", as though it is normal that a child should view a busy country road as his private race track and not expect to be caught.
No one will be told that the articulated-lorry driver had no rear number plate; that he keeps it under a seat in his cab so as to foil the speed cameras (which photograph the rear of offending vehicles) and anyone upset enough by his reckless driving to want to report it. Or that many in his trade routinely do the same, a point which is more than academic on certain notorious routes where one in five thundering through is a heavy vehicle.
Who cares? Time and again, "accidents" happen that are almost taboo in local conversation.
A garda recalls arriving at a scene where the paramedics were attending to the young driver. He walked around the car and almost tripped over the body of a lovely, 17-year-old girl. "No one knew she was there. She had been thrown through the back window and she was lying there, curled up in a ball.
"What really bothered me afterwards was that it was so totally unnecessary. Someone had seen the driver all over the road, speeding, 10 minutes beforehand. I begged and pleaded for that witness to come forward and he never did. As a result, when it went to court, the driver was charged only with careless driving, got a £350 fine and walked free. Given the circumstances, he might as well have shot that girl. Yet her family didn't even want to see him go to court."
And naturally, no one wants to talk about it.
"Accidents happen. There but for the grace of God," says one local piously. Sure enough, it could be any of us, it's part of what we are. A feckless child in legal possession of a lethal weapon; a witness with no sense of duty either to a dead girl or society; a family which mistakes forgiveness for justice and perpetuates the cycle; a justice system that perceives "careless" driving as a teensy oversight, a footling thing, worth less than a week's wages; a mature man who perceives such behaviour as an "accident".
Meanwhile, National Roads Authority (NRA) surveys show that more than half of us cruise at speeds faster than the legal limit and just over half of all drivers and only 20 per cent of rear-seat passengers obey the law by wearing seat belts.
Drink-driving arrests are rising, challenging the happy notion that it has become socially unacceptable. Drunk drivers killed at least 166 people last year and injured another 3,600, yet we haven't even scratched the surface of the problem.
In the Australian state of Victoria, they breathalyse about one million of their three million motorists every year; here we manage about 12,000. Even at that, 92 per cent of those tested are over the limit and about 61 per cent more than double it. "In other words," says a senior garda, "it's a conscious decision." How does he explain it? "We live in a culture where everything goes as long as you don't get caught. Look at the tribunals. You can't isolate road traffic from other aspects of Irish life."
Some garda∅ believe that the situation is almost too hopeless to retrieve, given the long history of official fecklessness. "Up to 1997, no one gave a toss", says one. We were the last European country to introduce a driving test. Our legal alcohol limit remains (with the UK) the highest in Europe. The infamous licence amnesty of the 1970s lives on in its many beneficiaries who are now probably giving driving lessons to their children. Anyone over the age of 21 with a clean licence can set up as a driving instructor. The driving test, say garda∅, is a "sick joke" where people who fail repeatedly can get back in the car, unaccompanied, and drive away without restrictions. (There is a middle-aged man who has just failed his fifth test even more miserably than the previous ones and who continues to cover hundreds of miles a week.)
Even those who pass don't have to prove that they are competent drivers; they don't have to prove that they can handle an emergency stop or skid. Some towns with a test centre care barely boast one set of traffic lights, never mind a roundabout.
"So you let all these lunatics out of the asylum, what do you think is going to happen?" asks another senior garda. "The Garda never made the laws - it's the properly elected politicians who do that. We don't put up the road signs or design the roads either. Yet we're left to police all this."
Meanwhile, the system that many trust will be the saviour of us all - the penalty points system - has been delayed for yet another year because, according to Conor Faughnan of AA, the Department of Finance withheld the £60,000 needed to update the Garda's computer database. This in the context of a 1999 Peter Bacon report which estimates the annual cost of road accidents in the Republic at close to £800 million.
The upshot, as honest garda∅ admit, is a population that feels virtually untouchable. They freely admit that your chances of being caught offending are virtually zero. "You could load up your car with machine guns and drive to Donegal and you won't see a garda from one end to the other," says a senior officer, who - like many of his conscientious peers - is seething with frustration.
In the UK and Sweden (with fatality rates less than half ours), for example, traffic units are recognised as a professional specialty and comprise some 8 per cent of the force. According to the National Road Traffic Bureau, there are some 400 people serving in such units in Ireland; that's about 3 per cent.
Yet these units carry out more than 90 per cent of all traffic enforcement - when they're not being pulled away to provide cash or VIP escorts or crowd management at football matches and sundry other non-traffic duties.
So what is the rest of the 12,000 strong force up to when it comes to the life-saving job of traffic policing? It has been demonstrated time and again, that there is no greater deterrent than a marked Garda car and the risk of being caught. A recent report for the North Eastern Health Board, entitled Men Talking, showed plainly that coercion ("being caught by the guards" or severe sanctioning), rather than self-preservation, is by far the most effective barrier to risk-taking in males.
Yet, among some garda∅, coercion appears to be over-ridden by the fear of being seen as heavy-handed and losing public support. "We police by the consent of the people," says a senior officer. "We don't know the tolerance level that the public would have, we don't know how far we'd have to go to get a change in behaviour. We have to work along with the people."
Dig further however and there is also a sense among some that many of the rural rank-and-file are not pulling their weight in this regard, in some cases because they are too cosily integrated with the community they police. On the other hand, their very bond with the community may be what makes them valuable as information-gatherers when that is required. But if they're no good at that either, then tough; there is no system of individual accountability within the rank-and-file Garda, so many units can end up "carrying" what one officer described as a slew of the "semi-retired".
By contrast, there are officers at every rank for whom every road death in their district is felt deeply, almost as a personal failure.
"Could I have prevented some of those deaths?" one asks, thinking aloud. Probably not. About half the collisions in Co Louth/Meath for example involve a single vehicle. A number of the more horrific recent crashes were caused by driver heart attack. Each region has a number of suicides every year.
To Weekend 3