Newspaper reports referred to the "accident" which killed Patrick McEvoy and his daughter Laura, 16, and injured Mary, his wife and her mother. But it was no accident. Their killer Larry Boggan had chosen to drink and to drive and had chosen to drive at up to 100 m.p.h. on the Dublin-Galway Road.
It's a grotesque misuse of language to call an almost inevitable event an accident, and I have long since abandoned any attempt to understand why newspapers and RTÉ perpetrate such linguistic falsehoods.
For language counts. When we lump the actuarially probable with the entirely unexpectedly random we are abandoning the laws of cause and effect for the juju of promiscuous happenstance. Two opposite concepts become lumped into the one word, and the benediction of causelessness is conferred on what was very definitely caused. Guilty men are linguistically exonerated, and no doubt within their own minds, the word "accident" will sooner or later banish any sense of responsibility for what they've done.
The McEvoys were driving home to Templeogue in July of 2001, when their car was hit by Boggan's, near his home in Clonard, Co Meath. He'd been drinking, and was overtaking at up to 100 mph when he lost control of his car. In addition to killing the two McEvoys, Boggan killed a passenger in his car, Martin Darby. Larry Boggan killed three people: and he did all this because he chose to behave in a fashion which was most likely to result in some such tragic outcome. This was no accident.
Boggan was charged with dangerous driving. Why was he not charged with manslaughter? If Boggan the killer-driver who slaughters three people by engaging in conduct that it is very likely to kill is not charged and convicted of manslaughter, then who is? Or is manslaughter a category of crime which is now reserved for women who decide to stab their sleeping partners to death? One would have thought he would have considered himself lucky indeed to find himself on a dangerous driving-only charge, with poor widowed Mary McEvoy left to get on with the ruins of her life. You got off lightly there boy. Plead guilt and count your lucky stars.
Except he did not plead guilty. He pled not guilty, and so caused a five-day trial, throughout which he maintained that he had no memory of what newspaper reports referred to as "the accident". This was due - according to evidence before the court - to amnesia caused by a blow to the head at the time.
Perhaps he remembers. Perhaps he doesn't. It's irrelevant. He caused the crash. No-one else. He did. No other interpretation of events exists. He chose to drink. He chose to drive at up to 100 miles an hour. He chose to behave in a fashion which could kill people; and by God it did. But then he also chose to plead not guilty, and thereby caused the state the trouble and expense of a five-day trial - and he also chose to put poor Mary through the unspeakable ordeal of reliving the worst day of her life.
He was of course found guilty. No other outcome was possible. But the sentence at Trim Circuit Court was just five years' jail. Three lives squandered; five years in jail. Out in three. A year a life.
And that was after pleading not guilty. What would he have got if he pled guilty, and spared the state the colossal expense of a five-day trial? His barrister Kevin Segrave declared that Boggan's remorse was "absolute, genuine and has existed day one and will until the day he dies." Good. Excellent. Wonderful. But what do these words mean? He has no memory of the events which he caused, so what's this about remorse from day one, when day one was the very day he was busy out killing people, and then forgetting all about it? And if he was full of remorse, why did he plead not guilty? Is not a sense of guilt a primary condition of remorse? Or is Boggan pioneering the novel concept of guilt-free remorse, which no doubt carries with it the bonus of being punishment-free also?
A comparably reassuring mastery of both the English language and jurisprudence was revealed by Judge Raymond Groarke, who said that Boggan had never intended to kill three people. That's right judge; go to the top of the class. Which was why he wasn't charged with murder. However, the judge was able also to interpret the not-guilty plea as a sign of remorse, adding that Boggan would forever carry the memory of the day with him.
What's that mean, judge? The court had already been told he had no memory at all of the crash. So what day does the judge think he'll remember? The day he got off with only five years for butchering Patrick and Laura McEvoy, and devastating poor Mary McEvoy's life?
We've failed Mary McEvoy; we've failed the memory of her dead husband and her dead child. Their lives, her life, must have some value, and this can only be measured in the condign severity with which we treat the man who chose to behave as he did, spreading ruination and death, yet who then denied responsibility for his deeds.
But in a world which calls what he did an "accident", why should he not be allowed the luxury of guilt-free remorse? He'll be celebrating his freedom in three years - around the same time that, but for him, Laura would have been celebrating her 21st birthday.