Kathy Sheridan asks: will we ever grow up? Will we always need an outsider to say what has been head-butting us for aeons, before it makes a newspaper lead or 10 minutes of air-time?
This is what an outsider had to say about Irish road behaviour: driving faster than the speed limit is "quite normal"; we have "a serious drink-driving problem"; the chances of getting caught are practically nil; you can drive "several thousand miles" without laying eyes on a garda. And - wait for it - the key to reducing road deaths is to instil "a fear among road users that offences will be detected and punished".
Impressed? You should be. Yeah, sure, it's practically a cliché, you've heard it so often, but now it has been said - at enormous expense, no doubt - by a Dutchman.
Fred Wegman is the consultant commissioned by the Government to review Ireland's road safety strategy, the man who gamely drove several thousand miles to gauge the level of Garda enforcement for himself. His conclusion?
"The present level of police enforcement should increase considerably. This level is modest in comparison with several other countries. It is striking that the chance of being caught in Ireland is so low".
Striking? Only if you're a Dutchman, I'd say.
Eighteen months ago, a red-faced senior garda with more of an overview of policing and politics than is good for his heart, delivered a more concise report, free of charge, for this reporter: "You could load up your car with machine guns and drive from Cork to Donegal and you wouldn't see a garda from one end to the other."
While the Garda traffic corps was less than half the average size of those of Britain and Sweden, he noted, it carried out 90 per cent of all traffic enforcement. That's when it wasn't being called upon to provide cash and VIP escorts or crowd management at football matches. In other words, fewer than 400 gardaí split between 24-hour/seven-day rosters, holidays, leave and unrelated duties, are supposed to enforce the traffic laws for several million citizens. At about the same time, a North Eastern Health Board study revealed - surprise, surprise - that "being 'caught by the guards' appeared to be the single biggest barrier to risk-taking in men of all ages".
Meanwhile, back at a big provincial station, one young garda was trying to discern the germ of a policy in his day-to-day work. "There seems to be no coherent plan. One week they are shouting for more speeding tick- ets, the next for more drink-driving arrests. 'Dublin' is on every Monday morning to see how many tickets were issued - and that becomes very urgent if there have been a few bad accidents over the weekend. But once they have the stats they're happy. They can say they've done their bit."
Ask a senior garda on the record if he has enough resources and his comment (if you're lucky enough to get one) will be on the theme of "How long is a piece of string?" Off the record, he might agitate about how special units, desk duties and what one describes as "the slew of the semi- retired" are filleting or draining the energy from the rank-and-file who should be on the streets.
At the height of Operation Encounter last year (established, you will recall, to thwart drunks and thugs at a time when two comatose young men lay in the same ward of Cork University Hospital), Cork city had about 40 gardaí on duty, including special units, to manage the 15,000-strong, early hours surge from the clubs and pubs on a busy Easter weekend. To put that into perspective, one Cork nightclub alone had 28 security guards on duty. It was in that time and context that Fianna Fáil's election manifesto promised an extra 2,000 gardaí.
What it failed to mention was that at the current rate of Garda resignations, retirements and recruitment, it will take about 14 years for those 2,000 jobs to be filled. And that's if frustration and low morale do not accelerate the numbers wanting out, as many expect. So much for the crisis response.
Meanwhile, some 4,000 trained gardaí, or a third of the current force, are sitting at a desk assigned to paperwork, according to Pat Rabbitte. The interminable negotiations about the "civilianisation" of just an eighth of these jobs have finally meandered into the hands of an implementation committee. The process towards even this very modest reform will take several more years.
The upshot is that just 400 gardaí are left to patrol the nation's streets at any one time, accor- ding to figures obtained by Senator Jim Higgins. These are what remain after discounting those assigned to paperwork or shuttling prisoners around the courts or sitting around courtrooms themselves for entire mornings and afternoons, like drones, reading out endless lists of drivers caught by the Gatso cameras.
Fred Wegman is probably an excellent consultant, but did we actually need him to tell us the head-bangingly obvious? We need no more reports, no more high-profile short-lived Garda PR ops. We need consistency and that begins with gardaí on the beat - in numbers. Visibly, authoritatively and above all, predictably.