Progress? Equality? Change? In this country? That's utterly laughable
Yesterday's headlines and intros prompted a long hollow laugh. "Retired gardai recruited in bid to tighten jail security," said one. "Easy riders put to test in crackdown: Bikers facing mandatory training," warned another, "Department of Transport considering new rules to ban learner drivers unaccompanied," promised a third.
The safety crises in our prisons and on our roads have remained loyally with us for years, as futile pseudo- initiative has followed futile pseudo-initiative.
Our prisons are supervised by a Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform which presumably sees equality in a system which confines five men to a four-bed cell, with a common chamber pot, while women prisoners have their own luxury rooms, complete with private showers and WC. The most risible truth about our jails was buried in one story: "It is now a specific offence to smuggle drugs into a prison.,Ha ha ha.
But it's been a specific offence to have drugs anywhere for decades, which didn't stop our prison system, containing the most-supervised prison population in all of Europe, (now to be super-supervised by nearly 200 ex-gardai) from becoming Ireland's drugs capital. It is also suicide central, a moral scandal that has caused no political scandal whatsoever. (Well, they're only working-class white boys, and they don't really count, do they?)
Now, it's nearly 30 years since a Fianna Fail administration, having thought deeply on the matter for a microsecond, decided that anyone who had twice failed a driving test, thereby proving that they absolutely should not be granted a licence, would instead promptly be given one.
This was like some ghastly anti-Irish jokes on British television, except it wasn't remotely amusing, because once you allow slackness to compromise the inaugural stages of what, after all, is primarily a policy governing safety, then catastrophe must follow.
It did.
We now have 400,000 unaccompanied and unlicensed drivers loose on our roads, and better still, this is clearly a consensual policy, for every political party (save the Shinners) has since been in power, and none tried to change it. We cannot say how many people have been killed by unqualified and unaccompanied drivers in that time: several hundred, three of whom I particularly recall.
Two sisters-in-law and one of their daughters were walking down a country road when they were hit by the out-of-control car of a 17-year-old driving on his mother's insurance just the day after he'd received his first provisional licence. Shortly afterwards, one of the surviving widowers contracted -- probably through stress -- a swift-moving terminal cancer, leaving his brother to raise two families alone.
Now if that atrocity didn't cause one of those storms of anger which convulse Irish life every fortnight or so, and it didn't, then quite clearly, there is a sort of passive approval of the morally bankrupt policy towards the armies of untrained drivers on our roads: any political party which sought to end this insanity would be politically doomed. You can see the result in the wretched standards of driving that are now commonplace in, and unique to, Ireland.
Fully 25pc of drivers have absolutely no idea how to signal at a roundabout, usually indicating left as they enter it, apparently because they are moving in a generally leftward direction, and then passing left exits without exiting, with their left indicators still idiotically indicating.
Forget our tribunals. The true morality of a state is best assessed in the conduct between democratically accountable government departments. That is governance at its purest, free of influence from the private or corporate sectors, where the will of the people runs true.
At this point I must break a recent promise and return to a subject I would not touch until this time next year. But having recently witnessed what is happening on the N7 and the N1, I would now in my anger effortlessly take a sledge-hammer to Michelangelo's Pieta, never mind to my own modest undertakings.
For to judge from those two roads, all of the 10,000km of highway administered by the National Roads Authority, involving hundreds of thousands of acres, have been surrendered to a vast harvest of ragwort, a weed which is both noxious and illegal. Now, the Department of Agriculture is obliged by law, which is itself administered by the Department of Justice, to compel the Department of the Environment, to make its subsidiary, the National Roads Authority, rid its lands of noxious weeds.
Yet far from this happening, the NRA is surely now the largest producer of ragwort in Europe, and with the apparent assent of three distinct government departments.
What heads roll? What heads ever roll in public bodies in Ireland? What heads rolled in the NRA over its immoral and demented policy-decision to build our entire motorway system without lorry-parks, toilets, restaurants, service stations or rest areas? None, of course.
What heads will roll for the massive and systematic violation of the Noxious Weeds Act by the very government departments which are meant to enforce it? Answers, on one side of the paper only, please.
So as for "Retired gardai recruited in bid to tighten jail security," and "Department of Transport considering new rules to ban learner drivers unaccompanied"? A hollow laugh, a grim ho ho ho, all the way to the graveyard.
- KEVIN MYERS
