You will not have heard of the name Arlene Wellbourne. She was 30 years of age when she died in her car near Blessington last week. It was a small crash. No national newspaper seems to have registered either it or the passing of Arlene's young life. Her husband Christopher, in their home near Kiltegan, is left to make sense out of something which is an intrinsic denial of sense. Arlene's car was hit by a car travelling at speed in the opposite direction.
The driver of that car, a man, survived; but poor innocent Arlene did not, and we must hope that she was unconscious or even dead as her car caught fire and her young body was incinerated.
Gadarene stampede
I know the road well. For much of the day it is a cavalcade of lunatics who seem convinced they have been conferred with automobile immortality. The N51 stands for so many roads across the country, where decency and respect for life and regard for the welfare of strangers are all abandoned in a gadarene stampede towards homicide.
Who cares? Who really cares? Who this day will think of poor Arlene Wellbourne, dead in her burning car in Wicklow? Today and yesterday, this week and last, our newspapers have been full of the scandals which have disgraced public life in this country. But aside the from Lindsay tribunal, none of these scandals involved loss of life. A far greater scandal than anything involving Charles Haughey or Ray Burke is what is daily being done on our roads, needlessly, tragically, and wickedly.
No, I don't expect anyone in power to be influenced by these words, for after so many years in journalism, I know how ineffectual columnists actually are. But following the slaying of three women pedestrians, two mothers and a daughter, in Kilkenny this year, by a 17-year old youth driving unaccompanied on a provisional licence, I really did hope that my suggestion then for all-party action might take effect. What I proposed was not radical; it merely involved the rule of law being applied. I suggested that the party leaders agree that provisional licence-holders may not drive unaccompanied, and that insurance companies may not lawfully give such drivers insurance cover.
Ruairi Quinn and John Bruton and Mary Harney and Bertie Ahern did not take up this modest proposal: and how many such provisional licence-holders have died since? How many people have such drivers killed? How many families are left in the position of the motherless Kilkenny families, one of which must also come to terms with the death of a sister, a daughter? And how many people would not have to cope with such family tragedies if action on provisional licence-holders had been taken after the Kilkenny deaths? But nothing was done; and we cannot calculate the consequence. Dear me; how very proud we must all feel at such condign political negligence.
Mature adults
But only part of our problem lies with unaccompanied provisional licence-holders. Even if we were to remove them from our roads, people would still be dying in inexcusably large numbers; the man who drove into Arlene Wellbourne and turned her car into a crematorium is a mature adult. There are also thousands of mature adults, mostly young males, who think nothing of driving on the wrong side of the road in order to arrive first at the next traffic light on red.
If it were merely a question of aggressive males, they at least could be tackled with severe, or better still, merciless policing. But that would not solve a cultural problem which lies at the heart of our roads policy. I have written many times about it, to no avail at all. That culture is one which is devoid of coherent intelligence or systematic plan, one in which any ad hoc, improvised and unconsidered solution to a problem is deemed satisfactory.
Thus youngsters who have just passed their driving tests may become driving instructors. Thus we have exit signs on motorways actually after the exit. Thus we have twin measurement systems on our roads, speeds in miles an hour, and distances in kilometres.
Thus we have a general speed limit on back country roads of 60 m.p.h. when even 30 m.p.h. is too fast. Thus we have roads such as that out of Monastereven which is divided by a broken white line, meaning overtaking is lawful, but which is festooned with notices declaring, "No overtaking". (Which is legally binding? Did the person in authority who decided two have two contradictory sets of signals think about that? Did he - or she - even care?)
Little anger
In January and February, before most of the 250,000 new cars expected on our roads this year had arrived, road deaths were up by nearly 10 per cent. With twice the population, we are slaughtering more than three times the number of people killed on roads in the North, and there seems little anger at this. Indeed, I get many letters on many subjects that I write on, but I get almost none when I write about the carnage on our roads. If this is a measure of how little people care - and I suspect it is - then we might look forward to a continuing banquet of homicide, in which poor Arlene Wellbourne, dead on a Wicklow roadside, and unnoticed outside her own immediate circle, is the merest morsel.