Perhaps the test of the true morality of a nation is not so much in its attitude to the old, or the poor, or the infirm, but in its response towards road deaths. It is perfectly possible, after all, to be unaware of the extent of concealed suffering in society. This does not regularly make our news headlines, so even the best-intentioned person might remain utterly unaware of the hardships which some people might invisibly be enduring, writes Kevin Myers
But absolutely no one can be unaware of the slaughter on our roads: at this point, we can say it is a wickedness to which the Irish people have passively given their assent. And our political parties haven't made reducing road deaths a manifesto priority, presumably because they know there are no votes there. Certainly, there was virtually no response - to me personally or to the letters columns next door - to the half-dozen columns I wrote on the subject in 2005.
Last January, I predicted that despite all the Government and Garda undertakings, road deaths would go over 400. I was wrong. They only went up to 399 - but they were still up 5 per cent, unlike anywhere else in the EU. Even that unprincipled villain Jacques Chirac made a reduction in road deaths an election pledge in 2002. Since then, traffic-related injuries and deaths in France have fallen by one third. In the first year after he was elected, road deaths were cut by 20 per cent. They have now fallen to under 5,000 for the first time since records began.
In Britain, road deaths stand at 3,200. Per head of population, this would be the equivalent of 200 roads deaths in Ireland. In Sweden, a country with 4 million cars, road deaths have fallen to 440. Per head of population, this would translate into 175 road-deaths in Ireland. Across the EU, the story is much the same. Only in Ireland are they increasing, without any political outcry whatsoever, and after years of this, we can only conclude that Irish people really don't give a damn how many of their fellow citizens are killed on our roads.
Now this is a fairly creepy realisation - but what other conclusion can one come to? Our national broadcaster has weekly convulsions over some subject or other, but RTÉ never seems to get really exercised over deaths on the road, presumably because its broadcasters, who can be regularly expected to sneer for Ireland on any topic, clearly don't really care either way. And if they don't, they are probably reflecting the popular mood of the country.
It is six years since random breath-testing was supposed to have been introduced. Six years: greater than the length of the second World War. We still haven't got it, and take refuge in some witless musings about the Constitution. Instead of changing the Constitution, we repeatedly plumb depths of cretinousness which could belong to some ghastly Irish joke of yesteryear.
Consider the super checkpoints before Christmas of up to 20 gardaí, who, instead of being able to breath-test at random, had to waste time engaging all motorists in conversation, in order to "form an impression" whether they were drunk or not.
Consider the recent Garda "research" which "reveals" - apparently to the amazement of all in authority - that a hugely disproportionate number of fatal crashes occur at weekends, between midnight and 4am. Well, stone the crows.
Consider the long-heralded Garda Traffic Corps, a decade in gestation. How many gardaí joined it last year? Just 48 - fewer than one a week. One-third of the gardaí with the corps haven't even received specialised driver training, and fewer than 10 per cent have received advanced training. And naturally, there are no plans to increase the capacity of the Garda driving school to train the "proposed" 250 additional recruits to the corps (we'll see how many actually join).
Consider the National Roads Authority, which actually made it policy not to erect crash barriers on the central reservations of our new motorways, after decades of experience in other countries showed they are essential for cutting road-deaths. The NRA is now, and at far greater expense, retroactively having to install them.
Consider the impossible challenges facing those decent gardaí trying to push their prosecutions through a thoroughly diseased and amoral legal system, one which exults in nitpicking triumphalism and the arcane witchcraft of verbal procedure. The rule of law has been surrendered to the freemasonry of lawyers, with their fetishes for legalistic mumbo-jumbo and their penchant for acquittals on tiny needle-points of law, on which annually dance hundreds of angels of death.
Such institutional imbecility is possible only because it is tolerated by our political classes. In turn, they know the electorate is not going to turn against them because of deaths on the roads, or the failure of gardaí or the courts to impose their will on our traffic. I drive regularly in France and Britain, and I never, ever see the sort of driving which I see almost every day in Ireland. About 10 per cent of drivers in this country are aggressive, ignorant, stupid, violent and unskilled thugs. These are the people who define the culture of our roads, and they are able to do so because there is absolutely no popular desire to dethrone them.
There will be some 420 road-deaths this year. With the right policies, at least half of these killings could be avoided. The only conclusion that one can now come to is that the people of Ireland are simply too morally bankrupt to demand those policies.