HOW peculiar that the Honda Bluebird motorbike has not yet made it onto any election manifestoes. It is a perfect way to win those few thousand young male votes which might just push it one way or another.
The Bluebird is the perfect little device to unleash on our roads. It costs under £10,000 in Britain, its top speed is just under 200 m.p.h., and it goes from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in 2.4 seconds. In other words, precisely the little toy to give to the speed-hungry young males of Ireland.
Each weekend we have a net crop of deaths: three last week-end, two aged 19 and one aged 20. Of the four people killed the previous weekend, three were under 20. The previous week-end, six motor-cyclists were killed in accidents involving young males. Young males seem to have been involved in five of the six road deaths the previous weekend.
Our road deaths in the Republic are increasing annually and remorselessly. Four hundred and fifty-six people were killed in 1995, and that itself was an increase of 4.3 per cent.
Sweeping Streets
If we had 4.3 per cent inflation, the governor of the Central Bank would have been called in, the ex-Minister for Finance would be sweeping streets in Belmullet, and the European Union would be seriously thinking about sending in a District Commissioner.
This is less important. This is merely lives. Do lives count?
They do not. Far from the appalling road-accident figures being an election issue, the reverse is the case. Fianna Fail proposes to increase the number of young males on the road, with a special training course to hasten the entry of the devil-may-care young into cheaper categories of road insurance.
No mention is made of a special and more demanding test for young males; no mention is made of ending cover through parental insurance (one of the main means of access for young men to a car); no mention is made of enforcing the existing law.
All we are promised in return for allowing large numbers of young males on the road is that they will go through a course paid for not by them, but through a levy on insurance premiums i.e., us.
In other words, the motorists who are largely not responsible for accidents - women, men over 30 will be obliged to subsidise the licensing and insuring of large numbers of young males, the very species which is already killing disproportionately on the roads.
Splendid Notion
Young males are young males. Merely because they have passed through the training course promised by Seam us Brennan does not mean they are safe on the road. After all, they have already passed a test: what was that meant to do if it was not to prepare them for driving on the public highway?
Is Seamus saying that the present driving test is meaningless? That it works in the case of young males only if supplemented by extra tuition paid.for by those who do not need it?
This is a splendid notion - government services paid for by those who do not avail of them. Why not introduce a farming levy to be paid for by the urban working class, and a road-building levy to be paid by the house-bound, and a newspaper surcharge to be paid for by illiterate monoglot Romanian immigrants?
Maybe government ministers should go rattling collection boxes through the cemeteries of the recently dead, demanding donations to enable a future generation of young drivers to go just as fast as the young men who killed them.
There are a couple of simple expedients to reduce road accidents. One is called speed limits. The law as it stands is not enforced - and I plead guilty here. I too speed, because I know the fine in the exceedingly unlikely contingency that am caught - will not he too exorbitant.
But if speeding fines started off at £1,000, with a mandatory loss of licence comparable to that absurd drink-driving law of a couple of years ago, which I trust the electors of Tipperary will remember on a certain day in June 1 do not doubt speeds all over the country would drop.
Graduated Limits
The second system is called insurance premiums. As things stand, the rest of the driving population is subsidising young males.
If insurance premiums were by law confined to fiscally discrete, sexually segregated age-groups which had to be self-financing, young males would not be subsidised to drive at any speed; and as a group they would by law and premium be coerced into socially responsible driving.
This already happens to a limited degree in the North, where newly-licensed drivers are restricted to 45 m.p.h. and must carry R-plates. There is no reason newly-qualified drivers here should not by law be restricted to graduated speed limits - up to 45 m.p.h. in the first year, 55 m.p.h. in the second, and 70 m.p.h. motorway driving after five years on the road, with automatic forfeiture of licence from the moment of transgression.
No reason - except, of course, that the machinery of law is too cumbersome to enforce economically; and who gives a damn? Who cares about the serial massacre by which so many are slaughtered by so few for so little reason?
Or on the other hand, not. Maybe some essential freedom is being violated here. Maybe young men should have the right to endanger the lives of everyone in their path and on 50 yards either side of them as they hurtle merrily through the livelong night to whatever sparkling destination beckons.,
Our roads are the worst in Europe. Our summer harvest of death is beginning, with foreigners, bewildered by appalling road signs or none at all, confused by the pot-holes and unfamiliar with our T-64 school of driving, promptly driving into oncoming traffic.
Now, politicians - this is your chance! Now is the time to woo the young vote by promising free insurance for all male Bluebird-owners under the age of 25: if we really work on this, we could double road deaths in a year!