Sir, - I write to support your correspondents Jude T. Lindsay (September 15th) and E. Ronayne (September 21st).
Ireland enters the economy of the Union on January 1st, 1999 as the only country of the 11 that obliges its citizens (and its visitors from Northern Ireland and the Union) to cope with traffic going both ways on national roads. This is a serious burden. Head-on crashes are inevitable.
The EU describes a road as a thoroughfare that is two metres deep (to avoid potholing) and has a median strip (to avoid head-on collisions). Anything else is best described as a boreen. There are plenty of them in Ireland.
Recent hypotheses blaming drivers for our abysmal 14th place out of 15 in the EU for road accidents need scientific evaluation. Drunken driving, careless driving or speeding are dreadful crimes and must be punished by the courts. Evidence accumulated by driving over 100,000 km in Italy, and extensively in most other countries of the Union leads, in my judgment, to different conclusions:
Irish drivers are on a par with the other 14 countries;
only in Ireland does one frequently meet drivers who pull back, flash their lights and ask you to go ahead of them;
anyone who has driven extensively in Italy will have been passed by cars which quickly go out of sight at 200-220 k.p.h.
The hypothesis that Irish drivers alone are to blame is difficult to validate. An important variable is the failure in this country to build adequate roads. As we also have an extremely low 14th place (with only Greece behind us) in car ownership, the volume of cars on our roads is set to double in the next five years. This will cause great danger on roads that do not have a median strip.
Money? There is plenty of money. The Government received £20 billion in car-related taxes over the past decade and received a further £5 billion from European taxpayers. Any betting man or woman would bet that we will pay at least another £25 billion over the next decade. That makes £50 billion. - Yours, etc., Dr D. Keegan,
Managing Director,
DEI Ltd.,
Blackrock,
Co Dublin.