Did Martians come down in the middle of the night early last year and steal An Garda Síochána? Because, apart from my cheery local garda, I have seen virtually no sign of the force in the past year.
Last January, I wrote of the appalling condition of the N81, which, I said, seemed to be barely policed. I must now apologise for that inaccurate observation. In fact, it is no longer policed at all. I have not seen a single garda on the entire road in the intervening 12 months.
The Martian theory aside, there could be two other reasons for this. The first is that God waved his wand over us and we became Swiss, going to bed at 10, getting up at six, studying local government and national ordinances over breakfast before proceeding to work, sedulously observing every traffic and municipal law. This transformation of the Irish character means that the only violations of the law ever to occur here involve putting too much parsley in the fondue, or failing to abate the din of cuckoo-clocks during the mating season.
But there is yet another possible reason - which is that An Garda Síochána has ceased to function as an organisation with clearly defined goals and modus operandi. In other words, it is a mess. And to judge from the calamity on our roads last year, it is worse than a mess. It is a slum, a scandal and an outrage - about which no one appears to wish to do anything.
As I said last year about the N81, which runs from Tallaght through Brittas, Blessington and Baltinglass, its most deadly feature are its convoys of sand and gravel lorries. These vehicles are often hugely overladen, and are usually uncovered. Not merely is this illegal - God knows, a small enough matter in Ireland - but it is also dangerous; and God can concur that in Ireland anyway, this too is a small enough matter.
Every year, the gravel falling like shrapnel from the lorries shatters hundreds of windscreens. With wet weather - which is sometime known to occur in this country - the spilt sand forms into a fine, adhesive muck which covers windscreens and obliterates road marking, making driving at night perfectly lethal. So here is an entirely predictable catastrophe waiting to happen, one which was pointed out a year ago.
The Garda response on the N81 in the past 12 months? Non-existent. In the intervening period, I have seen not one Garda checkpoint on the road. Not one. Nor is there a weigh-bridge for lorries, to check on their loads. Needless to say, many of the trucks have no plates. The other day I counted 25 sand and gravel lorries within 15 minutes. Only two of them had tarpaulin covers - the rest had uncovered loads rising clear above their sides. Assuming that pits work a 12-hour day, that is over 1,100 lorries shedding sand and gravel on this road every day.
So much for personal observation on one road. Our official statistics tell an even worse - though not surprising - story about the broader picture. An Garda Síochána reports that it arrested 567 drunk drivers in three weeks, or 27 a day. That - as a reader's letter pointed out earlier this week - translates as one per county per day. How many gardaí were deployed per day in each county to net this spectacular haul? It hardly qualifies as over-policing.
Road deaths fall in direct proportion to visible policing; so naturally, ours are soaring, and in direct contravention to our undertakings to the EU. We are meant to be reducing our road-deaths: last year they increased by 13 per cent, from 335 to 379. This is the equivalent of adding an extra month to the year. At this rate, road deaths in 2005 should come in at a healthy 430, give or take, and next year at 486. Oh what the hell, call it 500. Nothing like nice round figures. Or corpses. The Government was aiming for a 2006 death toll of 300. Oops.
Now in any other organisation - an airline or a newspaper or petrol company - the equivalent to the loss of life on the roads is a drop in sales. Believe me, the chief executives of very few organisations would survive a 13 per cent loss in sales, especially at a time of massively increased investment in technology and in personnel. So. Are there any changes being mooted at the top of An Garda Síochána? Or will yet another State-run organisation continue to be run with a happy disregard for goals, performance and, oh yes, human life?
I don't like knocking An Garda Síochána. I am instinctively pro-police, and I admire the motives which inspire all those admirable people to become Garda officers. But the merits and integrity of individual gardaí are irrelevant here. It is
the efficacy of the force and how it establishes and maintains its priorities which trouble me now. Everyone now knows that our national police force is chronically, pathologically dysfunctional; and good gardaí - and there are thousands of them - must presumably look ahead to professional lives of sterility, frustration and failure.
So - if things stay the same, as they probably will, and I haven't been zapped by an N81 sand or gravel lorry in the meantime - I should be able to trot this same column out this time next year. It's an ill wind. The great thing about lazy policing is that it makes for easy journalism.