Adoption of the "How's My Driving?" scheme by insurance companies is a welcome development. The service is already used by many commercial fleets, with vehicles carrying signs that invite comment about the driver to a special phone line, writes Frank McNally.
Criticisms are then passed on and, where necessary, offenders can undergo corrective training. Now insurers are offering reduced premiums to young car-drivers who accept similar scrutiny.
The potential for expanding this concept to other areas is exciting. It surely can't be long before we see bicycle couriers flashing past us on the footpath, with the question "How's my cycling?" stamped in foot-high letters across their butts. If we're quick, we'll just have time to note their identification details and the number of the 24-hour call centre we can shop them to, before they disappear over the horizon, en route to forced attendance at a bicycle etiquette workshop.
Bad restaurant service is another problem that could do with a lo-call solution. Irish people are notoriously reluctant to complain in person. But soon, whenever an incompetent server delivers something we didn't order and turns on his heels before we can say anything, the back of his uniform will have a 1890 number with the question: "How's my waiting?" We will leave the restaurant safe in the knowledge that the offender faces a special CERT re-education course before we visit again.
Ideally, the scheme might eventually extend to the careless use of golf umbrellas. There's already an argument that these things should require a licence, and a qualifying test similar to the one for drivers. But, at the very least, there should be a formal complaints procedure. The next time some eejit nearly takes your eye out on a narrow street, or blocks your view of a crucial incident in a football match, you'll be able to ring the number displayed under the question: "How's my umbrella usage?" If the offender has attracted three or more complaints in a certain period, the information will be passed on to the gardaí, who will then call to his house and confiscate the weapon. With drivers increasingly policing themselves, after all, the guards will have a lot of time on their hands by then.
We begin to encounter practical problems when it comes to that other curse of modern life: mobile phone misuse. It would certainly be nice if the person roaring into his Nokia beside you on the train had a prominently displayed sticker reading "How's my noise level?" and the number of a 24-hour call centre. But with phones getting ever smaller, where would you display it? No, we're probably stuck for now with the old-fashioned method of retribution in these cases: gathering all the identifying details you can from the loudmouth's conversation and later outing him on a dedicated website.
ALTHOUGH THE "How's My Driving?" phenomenon appeals to the particularly Irish pastime of complaining about other people behind their backs, it seems to have started - like everything else these days - in the US. And it's yet another example of something I was talking about recently in the context of "Internet vigilantism". That is, the harnessing of mass communications to turn a faceless world where nobody knows anyone else back into a small community, where you can't move without being noticed.
The real-life small communities we used to live in policed themselves through gossip. As a member of the community, you feared to transgress the agreed rules because of the loss of social standing that might result. To use the motoring metaphor, your reputation was like a driving licence, on which you could incur unspecified penalty points for misdemeanours.
Being drunk and disorderly on the main street might be worth two points. Having a blazing row with your wife which resulted in her throwing all your clothes and a suitcase from an upstairs window onto the main street might be four points, and so on.
There was no 12-point limit, as such. But when you accumulated a certain number of infringements, you risked disqualification from polite society. It would then take a sustained period of good behaviour before you would be readmitted (although the endorsement would stay on your licence for ever afterwards and sometimes be passed on to your children in the form of a nickname).
The village itself got a bit of a bad name in Ireland: its oppressive atmosphere satirised in a novel, The Valley of the Squinting Windows, that led to its author and his father being banished from the thinly disguised Westmeath community in which it was set. That was 1918, when village power was at its height. It has been declining ever since.
The surest indication that Irish people had started minding their own business was the appearance of the first "Neighbourhood Watch" signs in rural communities. When the neighbours really were watching, there was no need for signs. In fact, you knew the neighbourhood was in trouble, as a concept, when it had to start advertising.
Now, thanks to everything from the phone camera to the "How's my Driving?" scheme, the village is back with a vengeance. At least the HMD? process is voluntary. But the Internet Watch scheme is not. If you annoy somebody somewhere now, even without knowing it, you may find yourself appearing before a special sitting of YouTube district court, to be mocked by a jury of your peers. You get away with nothing now. There are eyes everywhere.