Sir, - Kevin Myers (June 5th) is wrong if he believes that people are not deeply worried about the sustained and appallingly high level of deaths and injuries on Irish roads and right that something must be done. Day after day I encounter absurd drivers overtaking me on blind corners, pushing into gaps I have left between myself and the car in front. Oncoming cars have violently to reduce speed to avoid a collision. The night before Kevin Myers' article was published I followed at a safe distance a car on the N81, as it weaved from side to side back and forth across the central white line, the driver clearly very drunk, a car coming fast in the other direction would have had the greatest difficulty avoiding a crash.
Bad driving and high speeds have for too long been a deepseated aspect of our national life. It is, as I believe Kevin Myers is suggesting, a blasphemous aspect of our culture because it destroys life and does not cherish it. I would support and encourage the formation of a political platform that took as its major policy the enforced, systematic and widespread reduction of speeds to the existing maximum speed limits and consequently the saving of hundreds of lives. - Yours etc., Bill Bowder,
Donard, Co Wicklow.