Do you remember the Doherty children? Possibly not. Rosie Doherty (10) and her brother Joe (7), last Saturday lost their mother Jane and their grandmother, Ruth Lugg, killed in a car-crash. Their father Trevor was critically injured. They too were injured, but less seriously. What a thought; two maimed children in a car, surrounded by injured, dead or dying family members.
In that same disaster, two other people were killed - they were Mark Collopy and James Walsh. Typically for the brutal times we live in, the smash made headlines on radio and television that night, but was already inside-page news the next morning, and by Monday received less than a quarter of the coverage given to the shooting of a single criminal in Dublin at about the same time. If you have forgotten the Dohertys, then there's little chance of your remembering the Kelly family. Josephine Kelly (41), her daughter Lisa (19) and her sister-in-law Sandra Kelly (38) were walking on the Athy-Castlecomer road eleven days ago when they were hit by a car and killed instantly.
The crash left eight children motherless; a ninth child, of course, was killed. Their two fathers are now their sole minders, homekeepers, breadwinners. The driver of the car is 17 years of age. He was driving unaccompanied on a provisional licence. He is now in a coma in hospital.
Ruin and heartbreak
I make no judgment about what happened in this tragic incident which has brought so much suffering to so many people. But can it be right that a young man should be driving alone on a provisional licence? Can it be right that the slaughter on our roads is such that we forget it almost as soon as it is tidied up? Can it be right that the ruin and heartbreak visited on the Kelly and the Doherty families seem to have no political consequence at all?
How much safer would our roads be if party-politics could raise its head above the feeding-frenzy for votes? Provisional licence-holders are a major voting block, constituting nearly 40 per cent of all motorists. Any party which sought to end their right to drive unaccompanied would be committing suicide. Therefore there must be cross-party consensus on the issue. Provisional-licence holders must not be allowed to drive alone. Not merely would this reduce roadsmashes, but, by happy chance, would also ease traffic congestion.
Are we capable of that vision, of that will? I doubt it. We prefer expediency. It was political expediency at its most imbecilic and amoral which initially caused a Fianna Fail administration some 20 years ago to allow drivers on their second provisional licence - i.e. ones who had convincingly shown that they were unable to pass a driving test - to drive unaccompanied. By laziness and by default, this permission has been extended to all provisional-driving licence holders.
It is in fact still illegal for anyone to drive unaccompanied on a first-time provisional licence. In practice, virtually all provisional licence holders do so. This absurdity is compounded by failure of political will at every turn. One argument for allowing provisional licence holders to drive unaccompanied is that there is a huge waiting list for driving tests. The reason? Because the union which represents driving test-examiners refused to allow more such officials be appointed.
Backlog
Instead of simply appointing more examiners regardless, the Government spent months negotiating with the union. Even now, with negotiations long complete, there are not enough examiners to cope with the backlog of applicants.
Moroever, though unaccompanied provisional licenceholders are in theory breaking the law, they can still be insured to drive. This is truly incredible: an unlawful act being insured and subsidised by the lawful and law-abiding. The insurance companies' conduct is in itself probably illegal - though of course, in the morally-infirm and legally-debilitated condition to which traffic policy has been reduced, noone has challenged them on this.
Why should insurers give a fig about the law when the State and its law-makers do not? If one insurance company seeks young people's custom, they all will. Insuring such people might not make short-term money but it will make long-term clients: and if a few score people yearly die because of the legally unlicensed and potentially lethal youngsters thus unleashed on the roads, won't the longer-term profits more than cover the compensation to the families of the short-term victims?
Expediency
Enter Pintoism. In the 1960s, the Ford Motor Company of Detroit decided it would be cheaper to compensate the families of those unnecessarily killed because of the Pinto's design failures than it would be to correct those failures. It was capitalism at its most quintessentially and evilly expedient, which, when exposed by US government inspectors, cost Ford many millions of dollars in punitive damages.
No punitive damages for those bereaved by Irish Pintoism; for Irish Pintoism cannot be exposed and punished by government inspectors when it is itself government policy which is Pintoist, which seeks expediency and finds evil. In the absence of cross-party consent, which party will promise to disqualify the unqualified from driving, or will block insurance companies from insuring them to drive illegally? None, of course. So roll up, roll up for provisional licence jamboree! But hush. Not a word about the dead, the maimed, the orphaned: there's the next general election to consider.