Missing the point

Emissions: Next week, ambulance drivers are planning protests at the prospect of facing, along with fire crews, penalty points on their personal driving licences for transgressions while on duty.

Now, I jumped at this. What are they supposed to do other than bend a few rules? Are ambulance crews to lob the injured party onto a Luas, to be dropped off outside St James's Hospital? Are fire crews to stop driving to emergencies altogether and merely practise their raindancing?

Then I read the small print: points will only apply when they're not actually responding to an emergency call, when they're caught acting the maggot because they're in a rush back to the depot to catch Coronation Street or get stuck into their latest knitting project. Fair enough.

But hold on a second. Imagine you're an ambulance driver stationed at Tallaght General Hospital. You are called out one evening to a house in Clondalkin. Some eejit has glued his hand to the wall while putting up wallpaper. (Don't laugh - it happens. Don't you watch television?)

Five minutes, job done, crew on the way back to base quickly to ready themselves for the next call. Or so they think. They hit rush-hour traffic. They're stuck. They're not allowed stick on the lights, blare the siren, nip through the odd amber, dodge into bus lanes, break the speed limit by two miles per hour, nothing.

They have to sit there like the rest of the sheep despite the probability that in 10 minutes they will be urgently needed miles away. How is that serving the public interest, pray tell?

I recently witnessed an empty coach being guided at great speed by four Garda motorcyclists through the teeming backstreets off George's Street in Dublin's city centre.

If regular motorists drove like that, they'd be up before the courts, never mind the penalty points. But this coach was special - it had a dispensation, indicated by a small cardboard sign on the windscreen, which read "Ministerial Coach. EU visit."

Did I say the coach was empty? Now, there's great talk from some quarters about the pernicious influence on Irish affairs of invisible EU bureaucrats, but this is ridiculous, I thought as I emerged from the sanctuary of a skip.

Far be it from me to imply that our Government looks upon laws as applying only to the rest of us minions, but may I just remind you of a certain, undeniable fact that exposes this hypocrisy.

The convoy of no lesser man than our esteemed Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, was clocked by Irish Times journos travelling at 90 miles per hour during the last election. Granted, he probably believed he was on an emergency mission to save the country from what he regarded as a fate worse than death - a Fine Gael-led Dáil. He laughed it off, as is his wont, with a bit of trademark Bertie-ism. He's not the boss for nothing.

Frankly, if I was St Peter at the pearly gates doling out guest-list passes to heaven, an ambulance or fire brigade driver would have an ever-so-slightly higher chance of admittance than the average politician. And, as you will agree, most of our politicians are decidedly average.

A reader writes about the recent Emissions on courtesy towards disabled drivers. While on a recent trip to France, she spotted a notice in a reserved parking spot. Translated roughly into English, it said: "If you take my space, take my disability too." Touché.