How reassuring to hear that the Government is going to conduct a survey into the risks caused by drivers using mobile phones. Nothing more splendid. We could, of course, start off by having a tribunal, but after the bloody attrition suffered at the legal Stalingrads of Hamilton, McCracken, Moriarty and Lindsay, barristers are increasingly hard to come by.
Some of these shell-shocked veterans are all tribunalled-out and are fit only for light duties in the Four Courts. Others claim immunity from conscription to Government duty, as conscientious objectors. And others still are pleading compassionate grounds for exemption: I'm the last breadwinner in the family, my eldest brother fell in action on the first day of McCracken, the next died in gas attack during Moriarty, and my sister, in only her second week out of King's Inns - sob - a beautiful, beautiful girl, the flower of her generation, copped it at Third Lindsay. She's not dead, but she might as well be; just sits in St Pat's, mumbling "IBTS", and gibbering.
Traditional route
Which leaves the alternative route, the ancient one traditionally favoured by Ministers, which involves appointing something callled "an expert committee", who - traditionally anyway - also go by another name: cronies. In the long run this will almost in variably lead to a tribunal - just think of the State cronyism which led to the beef tribunal, to McCracken and to Moriarty. And most of all, consider the perfectly lethal cronyism which led to Lindsay, and which also caused the infection of nearly two thousand people with diseases which will either kill them or measurably shorten their lives.
An Irish solution to an Irish problem, as the greatest cronyist of them all once put it.
The beauty about a cronylogical solution to any current problem is that it defers the tribunal until another generation of lawyers has emerged, one which has no experience of the trench warfare of tribunals - the battles of attrition, the endless boredom broken by the sudden, violent raid on an archive or a accountant's office. Cronyism gives some chums jobs, and allows the resulting mess to be cleared up by a later cohort of lawyers.
Now you could say that it doesn't need a committee to decide whether or not using mobile phones when you're driving is dangerous, any more than one needs to convene a committee to investigate the merits of looking for a gas leak with a burning candle, or of using your tongue to see whether a light socket is live, or of testing for trains on the DART line by lying on it.
All you have to do is watch young men and women in their 4x4s entering a roundabout with their mobile phones held to their ears. One quarter of the way round they have gone from the inside lane to the outside without indicating, or even noticing what they're doing: half way round, and they leave orbit, like a space vessel heading off to the moon.
The great pity of it is that they are not actually whisked off to do a lunar landing; it would be a rare pleasure to look through one's telescope and see these cretins scattered across the Sea of Tranquillity, still brainlessly chattering away to one another from their crashed cars.
In-depth research
But say the committee of experts haven't got the time to do this sort of in-depth investigative research at a roundabout; what are they to do then? Well, they could just read Eithne Donnellan's excellent article on the subject in this newspaper last Monday.
She reported that research in New England revealed that drivers using hand-held phones were six times more likely to make errors than were non-users, and that in the UK, 17 fatal crashes are known to have been caused by drivers using their mobile phones. In Japan, 22 people are known to have been killed in the first six months of 1998 in such crashes. So we know the truth: using mobile phones while you're driving will cause deaths on the road. The only question for the Minister's squad of sleuths is whether or not to make it illegal.
Is it worth it? Conor Faughnan of AA is against the introduction of fresh road laws when batteries of old ones aren't applied. And they aren't. It is, for example, illegal to eat while you're driving. When was this law ever enforced? (Moreover, when was it put into the statute-book, and why?) When are drivers prosecuted for not belting their children in?
Laws not enforced
Eithne Donnellan reported that the Garda press office rejected the suggestion that current laws are not being enforced: "Instances of dangerous driving that come to our attention are never ignored." This is imbecilic rubbish. Two years ago, a car in which I was a passenger was rammed from behind and nearly written off in a three-car pile-up. The investigating garda announced that because no one had been seriously hurt, there would be no prosecution. Thus the decision to prosecute was not based on the quality of the driving, which could have killed me or broken my neck, instead of causing it the whiplash injury I suffer from to this day, but on the luck of the outcome.
And luck of the outcome is really what saves us all from being killed by these lunatics who try to corner while babbling their vapidities on their mobile phones (lorry drivers in particular).
Making it illegal would at least be a start. Instead, we have a committee to consider it. And then, of course, in a few years' time, the tribunal.