Drink driving hysteria continues to grow

Recent reports in the national media suggest the Road Safety Authority and the Government have received a fresh recommendation from the Cabinet-appointed Advisory Group on reducing ‘drink driving’ limits.

It is believed that, should this advice be enshrined in legislation, the recommended new limits will be 50mg (down from the current 80mg) for full licence holders and 20mg for those on ‘learner permits’.
There is increasing concern that the Government and the RSA may be panicked into rushing these measures through, following a recent rise in road fatalities. Just some of the high profile road accidents in recent weeks include the tragic death of a young mother in Wexford, while in Kildare another young mother lost two of her children in a collision with a truck on a rural road.
While the causes of these accidents have not yet been identified definitively, any suggestion that lower drink driving limits would have saved lives in these daytime accidents seems likely to prove not only disingenuous but insulting to the memories of those who have died. The stark fact is that while road deaths have risen by a quarter since the start of 2008, this simply cannot be attributed to alcohol.
Moreover, it was recently admitted to Hot Press by a senior road safety official that the proposed new limits are not in fact expected to reduce the fatality rate on Irish roads and that the move is essentially cosmetic. The same official rationalised the RSA’s stance on the issue by suggesting that even if it cannot be established that alcohol is responsible for causing particular accidents, removing one possible cause just might do some good.
In contrast, however, Canadian, New Zealand and UK policy has been to retain the limits at 80mg and to concentrate their efforts on enforcing the laws at those levels and above. It is widely accepted that a significant risk of accidents occurs only when drivers are above the 80mg limit.
There is, in any event, a worrying dearth of up-to-date or accurate information on drink-driving in Ireland. For reasons known only to themselves, the Road Safety Authority persists in basing their policies on outdated 2003 statistics, which pre-date more recent measures such as random breath testing, tougher penalties for drink-driving and increased penalty points offences
As was demonstrated recently in Hot Press, in an article that attracted considerable national interest and debate, the 2003 figures are misleading in several respects. In particular, they failed entirely to take into account the global accident risk for all drivers. From a statistical point of view this can be viewed as a deliberate attempt to inflate the figures. Analysis in Germany showed that alcohol consumption by drivers could be attributed as the cause in only approximately 10% of road acidents there. This puts the 40% figure regularly trotted out here into perspective as being both ridiculous and thoroughly misleading.
It is inexplicable that this proper analysis of the figures is not being mirrored here – except as a reflection of a prohibitionist bias that is being pushed by anti-alcohol campaigners.
Much of the mainstream media including RTÉ, The Irish Times and The Irish Independent continue to follow the official line that up to 40% of fatalities are caused by alcohol. As Hot Press has pointed out already, if this were the case in 2008, it would mean that none of the measures introduced in recent years have had any effect on the problem – which in itself would be the worst possible indictment of the entire apparatus of road safety policy making and implementation.
There is, meanwhile, considerable reason to believe that the proposal to reduce the current limits will backfire.
The support which currently exists for stiffer penalties for people caught significantly over the limit could be forfeited if the government is seen to be going beyond what the public perceive as being reasonable and fair.
There is now a growing chorus of voices, especially in rural areas, questioning the motives of the Road Safety Authority in their seeming obsession with alcohol when it comes to road safety. There has been a clear attempt to stifle any debate on this matter and to rush through what amounts to draconian legislation, without properly considering the wider consequences.
The question now has to be asked whether this move is about road safety alone – or if, rather, the road safety issue has been hi-jacked by the broader anti-alcohol agenda. Hot Press will be investigating this in more detail in an upcoming feature.
In the meantime, we have asked the Road Safety Authority the following questions:
• 1. Are accidents in which the innocent party has taken alcohol, and the guilty party has not, included in the statistics regarding drink driving incidents?
• 2. If so, why is this the case, when clearly alcohol was not a causal factor?
• 3. Are accidents in which pedestrians have taken drink and drivers have not included in drink driving statistics.
• 4. If so, why is this the case, when clearly driver alcohol consumption was not a causal factor?
• 5. Leaving these and similar circumstances out of the calculations, what is the figure arrived at for ‘alcohol present in the system of the driver as a possible contributing factor’ in accidents?
• 6. Does the RSA not recognise the difference between ‘alcohol present in the system of the driver as a possible contributing factor’ and ‘alcohol as the causal factor’?
• 7. Why is the Global Accident Risk not taken into account when the figures which purport to represent the role of alcohol in causing accidents are being calculated?
• 8. Does the RSA not recognise the concept of Global Accident Risk?
• 9. If it does, why has it not included this concept at any stage in its deliberations or in the figures released into the public domain?
• 10. Does the RSA not recognise the likelihood that an accident on a very bad road where a driver has taken one drink may be a result of the same factors as an accident on an equally very bad road where the driver has not had a drink?
• 11. Can the RSA explain why the UK is third placed in the European Safety League with a limit of 80mg and Ireland is at No.12?
• 12. Can the RSA explain why we are still operating on the basis of 2003 figures?
We will update you on the answers when we get them...