Comedian Tommy Cooper used to brag about the time he was complimented on his driving after finding a note on his car windscreen. It said, “Parking Fine”. Were he to return from the grave, he would soon discover that driving in Ireland is no joke.
“Sometimes you literally take your life in your hands on Irish roads,” Judge Colm Roberts declared on January 16th. “Speed kills.”
He was speaking about the case of Kerry TD Michael Cahill who was caught doing 190km/h on the M8 near Mitchelstown on March 13th last year. Such was the politician’s hurry home to his constituency the day the Dáil rose for a fortnight’s St Patrick’s Day holiday that he drove on for another four or five kilometres after an unmarked chasing garda car switched on its flashing lights for him to stop.
A van driver about to overtake an articulated truck had to pull aside on the motorway to allow Cahill’s Audi Q5 to “pass at speed” after it “aggressively came extremely close behind” it. There is a name for that kind of intimidatory driving. It’s called tailgating. It is an offence warranting three penalty points. Still, it is as common as tarmac on Ireland’s motorways.
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His colleagues describe Cahill, a first-time TD, as “a quiet enough fella, understated”. He was fined €500 but his two-year driving disqualification will prove the greater nuisance in navigating the 4½ hour road journey between Leinster House and his home in Rossbeigh, Co Kerry. Despite resigning from the Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Home Affairs and Migration – albeit not until after his conviction – his comments about the case indicate a failure to fully recognise the potential public harm caused by his style of driving.
Cahill said he was speeding because he was running late for an event in Kerry that he had organised. He has not explained why he organised it for a Dáil working day.
“This is an embarrassment for me, for my wife and adult children who are actually annoyed with me to be here at all,” he said. “I’m annoyed with myself.” Annoyance is when you forget your umbrella. Embarrassment is when there is spinach wedged between your front teeth.
Last year, 190 people were killed on Ireland’s roads, the biggest number in more than a decade. One of the victims was Kevin Flatley, a member of the Garda roads policing unit, who was killed while operating a traffic checkpoint at Lanestown, Co Dublin on May 11th. He would probably be alive today had he had not been enforcing the driving laws laid down by the legislature in the Dáil.
Cahill’s case raises the question: should those in charge of the laws of the land be held to a higher standard of driving compliance? Judge Roberts seemed to think so when he said that, as a member of the bench, he feels obliged “to show an example when I am driving”.
Ireland’s roads are cursed with traffic jams and black spots but motorists’ hubris is the biggest curse of all. It manifests in bullying other drivers out of the way, cutting inside, breaking red lights, usurping bus lanes, tailgating, texting, ignoring traffic-restriction signs and the perpetual two-fingers.
And why wouldn’t they when they see the people who make the laws break them?
TDs and senators, some of whom persistently oppose any tightening of drink-driving laws, enjoy a limited constitutional immunity from arrest while driving to or from Leinster House. Unluckily for Colm Keaveney, who lost his Dáil seat in 2016, Bunreacht na hÉireann’s free pass was unavailable when he was arrested at a checkpoint near Tuam in 2023. This week, he was sentenced to 220 hours’ community service and banned from driving for three years for driving under the influence of cocaine and with no insurance on two separate occasions.
The former Labour Party chairman who defected to Fianna Fáil had already been banned for four years after pleading guilty for not stopping after a collision and failing to give a blood or urine sample.
In court on Tuesday, his lawyer, Gearóid Geraghty, said the former politician had suffered “a dramatic fall from grace” and had become addicted to cocaine after developing a dependency on painkillers following an injury he suffered in 2006. Keaveney was elected to Galway County Council in 2019 and was appointed to the Joint Policing Committee. Councillors are responsible for creating bylaws setting speed limits and implementing traffic restrictions in their region. He did not contest the local elections in 2024.
Sympathy is a common thread in the travails of both Cahill and Keaveney. His colleagues in Leinster House say Cahill’s 190km/h cross-country sprint seems out of character. Fianna Fáil did not respond by deadline when asked on Tuesday if his conviction had been considered by the party’s rules and procedures committee, as promised by leader Micheál Martin.
In Keaveney’s case, it is tempting to feel pity for the once dapper and self-confident TD. Not quite so tempting, though, if someone you loved was killed by a dangerous driver or left maimed for life.
Speed, drink and drugs are not the biggest killers on Irish roads. Ambivalence is. It resurfaced during the controversy that culminated in Barry Cowen’s sacking in 2020 as minister for agriculture over his conviction for drink-driving in 2016. The mind-boggling detail that a 49-year-old TD, as he was then, had been driving on a provisional licence was hardly mentioned amid the political rumpus.
Ireland’s roads are awash with a testosterone-fuelled ethos that the biggest, fastest and most lawless are to be admired. Sneaking regard kills. That ambivalence is captured by the anecdote about a now-deceased TD who was stopped for driving in the wrong direction on a one-way street.
“Didn’t you see the arrows?” the garda asked.
“I didn’t even see the Indians,” the well-lubricated politician reputedly replied. It’s an old story that still ekes hearty guffaws.
Until that attitude is defeated, checkpoints and speed cameras are fighting a losing battle. When a national politician is convicted of a serious traffic offence, there should be political consequences as well as legal ones.
Leinster House needs not only to set the laws, but to set the example too.
