OPINION:WHAT CAN have been going through Eric Doyle's mind in November 2006 as he drove his car along the Rathgar Road in Dublin? Not a lot that mattered, it would seem, because at the time he was almost certainly making a call on his mobile phone. He was also travelling at between 60 and 76 kilometres per hour in a 50km/h area and had been in several pubs before getting behind the wheel of his car, writes PETER MURTAGH.
It was Lily Hastings-Bass’s misfortune to be crossing the Rathgar Road with some college friends just as Doyle’s Nissan Micra car came along. He never saw her because, it would seem, he was looking at his mobile phone. According to Lily’s friend, the car seemed to come out of nowhere. The friend reached the pavement just in time, only to hear a dull thud behind her as the car hit Lily and then sped away.
Lily was from Berkshire in England and was studying English and history at Trinity College Dublin. She only arrived in Ireland two months before being hit by Doyle. She sustained severe injuries – broken bones and damage to her brain – and remained on a life-support machine for 11 days before dying. She was just 20 years old.
Two days before Lily died, gardaí got an anonymous tip about Doyle and they seized his car when he was away from his home. Forensic evidence showed that Lily had been hit by it.
Doyle subsequently turned up drunk at a Garda station and said a Traveller, whom he named, had been driving the car when it hit Lily. But the evidence didn’t support Doyle’s lies and his mobile phone placed him behind the wheel at the time.
Pathetic inadequate people like Eric Doyle sometimes wreck other people’s lives and cause immeasurable pain to the families of their victims. They clog up the courts daily. But what makes Doyle’s case particularly noteworthy, in my opinion, is that he clearly believed he would never be caught. Why so? Because at the time he killed Lily Hastings-Bass, Eric Doyle had 39 convictions for a whole slew of road traffic offences, including drink-driving and lying to the police. He had no licence or insurance and only two months before killing Lily, he had been banned from driving for four years.
None of the reports of his jailing last week for seven years gave any indication that he was particularly thick. He was just bad: a repeat offender completely incapable of taking responsibility for his actions.
One reason for such a pattern of behaviour has to be the belief that he will not get caught. How else can one explain a man who, banned for four years, is driving with abandon two months later – and, for all one knows, was driving within hours of having been banned?
And the disturbing thing is that, but for what happened on the Rathgar Road, he’d probably be driving still.
For all the progress made in recent years in enforcing the drink-driving laws, there is still very little enforcement – or evidence of enforcement – of other traffic violations. For the rest of this week, try counting the number of L plates you see on motorways (an offence) or the number of cars with a rear light or a headlight not working at night (an offence).
In other jurisdictions drivers of such vehicles are routinely pulled up by police and it is through such enforcement that other issues are uncovered – like driving while banned.
Lily Hastings-Bass’s organs were donated after death. Her old school, Marlborough in Wiltshire, set out to raise £50,000 in her memory for a charity, Action For Brazil’s Children Trust, a fundraising organisation that supports community projects for street children in some of Brazil’s poorest areas that was selected by her family. By June last year, they had got up to £36,447. I don’t know if they hit their target.
Doyle is now serving his sentence, having eventually pleaded guilty. With good behaviour, he’ll be freed after a few years. But he’s been banned from driving for life.