It's not just on the main, speeding roads that you meet the dangerous situation. On nice, twisting, shady side-roads, purple elderberries overhead, haws ripening in the hedges, you may suddenly come face-to-face with a huge pan-technicon, sometimes with a trailer swinging behind. You learn to honk loudly on going into a bend, even, so to speak on your own territory. These side-roads were built, at the most, to allow two cars to pass. Some would say farm carts.
The present blitz on road safety seems to concentrate on drink-driving and speeding. So much so that many people now, in the older bracket, take the sensible view that even one drink, even with a meal, is just a slight risk and not worth taking. For one's own safety, for a start. As for speeding, the Garda, we are told, is going to combat it with cameras and other devices. But you don't have to be exceeding the limit to be driving dangerously. How many people could say that they are not regularly pursued to a distance of only a yard or two by someone determined to make them go faster - or just someone putting a scare into them. Indeed, Justice Brophy recently told of being tailgated, as the term is, on his way to court in Kells for a couple of miles. And he couldn't get the number of the car.
There are problems on motorways notably the M50. You are doing the permitted 70 m.p.h., or near it, when an aggressor comes up behind you, pushing you to exceed the limit. What do you do? Go over the limit and risk the weight of the law, for it is hard to get safely into the slower lane at times? Or do you grit your teeth and keep on at the steady 69/70? Or maybe the speedster will swerve into the left lane and, doing about 10 miles an hour over limit, come back into the fast lane. The car is soon out of sight.
If you are coming into Dublin in the evening, when the commuters are raging their way home to Dunshaughlin or Navan from their city offices, you regularly face the daredevil who breaks out from the long line of home-goers and races towards you, yours being maybe the only car in the approaching lane, and dares you to give way - this on roads not suitable for three cars abreast. It is the most dangerous move of all, for if the driver has to try to dive back into the line, he may involve several cars in a nasty mess. Or you are expected to climb into the hedge. Gardai have their hands full.