COUNTY VIEW: Losing the road-deaths battle

According to Garda statistics, we are well on the road to reaching the highest death toll on Irish roads over the past 25 years. Despite intensive media campaigning, and ever-more graphic representations of road accidents and their aftermath, the numbers continue to rise and we are now seeing a reversal of what seemed an encouraging trend in recent years.
The causes of the rise in road fatalities are numerous – more vehicles on the roads, woefully inadequate policing resources, a casual approach to driver testing and competence and, above all, a cavalier attitude to the law on the part of so many motorists.
One glaring example is the prevalent practice of learner drivers flouting the rules and ignoring the requirement to be accompanied by a qualified driver. It is a breach of the law that tells its story in stark statistics. Last year, 15 people lost their lives in fatal crashes involving learner drivers; of that figure, 14, or 93 percent, involved drivers who were unaccompanied by a fully licensed driver.
It is less than ten years since, a few days before Christmas, a mother and daughter lost their lives in Cork when an unaccompanied learner behind the wheel of her father’s car, exiting from a side road, collided with the innocent victims. Their car flipped over and wedged itself in a flooded roadside drain, where mother and daughter drowned while frantic efforts were being made to save them. The offending learner driver had less than a year’s driving experience, had completed only nine of twelve mandatory lessons, but yet was given sole access to the vehicle by her father.
That incident prompted demands for an entire review of the provisional licence regime, but to date the system has instead gone into reverse. The learner driver system is now a merry-go-round, with soaring numbers gaming the regulations to a farcical level. There are now in excess of eleven thousand motorists still driving on learner permits for longer than 20 years; a total of 27,000 are availing of learner permits for between ten and 20 years. Last year, 6,000 permit holders failed to show up for the scheduled tests they had booked but yet, under the regulations, the RSA continued to renew their permits.
Even more perturbing is the revelation from MIBI, the body representing motor insurers, that in the year 2022, there were 188,000 uninsured drivers on Irish roads. These are the ticking time bombs who have not the slightest regard for the basics of responsible behaviour and who are largely responsible for the exorbitant insurance premiums foisted on law-abiding citizens. It would be hard to disagree that we seem to practice a bizarre level of official tolerance for law breakers.
All of that, however, pales in comparison to the position concerning drivers who have been disqualified by the courts but who neglect to surrender their licenses. In the past two years, 17,000 drivers were disqualified in the courts; of that number, less than 1,000 chose to surrender their licenses. Of the remaining 16,000 who proceeded to carry on regardless, just one was subsequently convicted for not doing what he was required to do.
The entire scenario has led to a pass-the-parcel blame game where different arms of the State blame each other, with the result that nothing gets done. The Gardai maintain that that it is the Department of Transport which is responsible for the license system, including the monitoring and recording of disqualifications. The Department says it is the duty of the Courts Service to ensure that disqualified drivers surrender their licenses in court. The Department further says it is immaterial, since disqualified drivers will continue to drive anyway.
And all the time, road deaths rise, and the law of the land falls further into disrepute.