The age of living dangerously

Have you ever had the urge to drive fast? Have you taken pleasure in it? And if so, should you be treated as a pariah? Does it make you unfit to get behind the wheel of a car? Those might not have sounded like serious questions five years ago, but they do now.

It would be impossible to ignore the fact that here has been a spate of accidents involving young drivers in Ireland recently, with terrible and tragic consequences. The deaths of Brian O’Neill (19) Ciaran Hagen (20), Dermot Thornton (21), Gary McCormack (21) and John McQuillan (27), all from the tiny town of Threemilehouse in Monaghan, offer the starkest incidence yet of the nightmare reality of what can happen when someone miscalculates behind the wheel of a speeding car. There are only a couple of hundred inhabitants in Threemilehouse. To say that the local people have been devastated by one of the most appalling road accidents in the history of the State is to put it mildly. The town will never be the same again.
No one yet knows the cause of the accident. The assumption is that the two Volkswagen Golfs were travelling in opposite directions and crashed head-on. Both vehicles were utterly destroyed by the impact, looking afterwards like thoroughly mangled wrecks, one overturned, the other crushed hopelessly in on itself, as if it had been run over by a gigantic truck. That at least one of the cars was travelling at high speed seems incontrovertible. The scale of the damage would not have been possible otherwise. A photograph, published by the Sunday Tribune, showed one of the speedometers lodged at 140 miles per hour. No indication has been given yet as to whether or not drink was involved.
There have been other shocking accidents, in which speed has been a major contributing factor. And the statistics show that young men between the ages of 17 and 24 are the most likely to be responsible, when things do go horribly wrong on the roads. So is there anything that can be done to save those most at risk from themselves? And to save innocent third parties from those who take the kind of crazy risks that result in loss of life?
The immediate response has been to propose targeting young drivers with tough new restrictions. The Road Safety Authority has promised to deliver a “suite of recommendations” to the Minister for Transport, Martin Cullen. The chief executive of the association, Noel Brett, has observed that the behaviour of 17 to 24 year old drivers is the biggest issue for the board of the authority since it started work last month. Given that the statistics show that a 17 to 24 year old male is seven times more likely to be killed in a car crash than the general population, it would be impossible to disagree with that analysis.
Maybe, however, there are options that should be considered, apart from the introduction of hostile new laws, especially if there is a risk – and there is – that they will inflict hardship on the innocuous as well as the dangerous.
The fact is that the phenomenon of young men taking crazy risks behind the wheel of a car is not a new thing. Far from it: in the first wave of rock’n’roll back in the ‘50s, playing chicken was a teddy boy leisure pursuit. It was a game in which one car would drive at another at high speed – and the first to flinch was the loser. Many young men like speed. And they like danger. Motor racing wouldn’t exist as a sport if they didn’t.
The question is, can they be helped to channel that urge into an activity that carries less risk?
Simply threatening to whack young drivers with penalty points is not enough: they are perfectly capable of ignoring you, especially in and around the smaller towns in the country where many of the worst accidents seem to occur.
It’s a problem that the attitude of the Gardai to the enforcement of the current speeding restrictions makes no sense – and I say that as someone who, to date, has not incurred any penalty points. They constantly monitor relatively safe stretches of road, on which there are often stupidly inappropriate speed limits, in order to register the maximum number of offences. Far from being constructive, foisting penalty points on people of any age in this way brings the law into disrepute. It can also act as a positive incitement to drivers to go hell for leather on those twisty secondary roads where the speed limit is on the high side – all the more so because you could drive for ever on roads of that type and never see a speed trap. The point is that the law is far more likely to be respected if it is enforced in an even-handed and intelligent way. That should be a priority.
In addition, where young drivers are concerned, the idea of providing a context in which kids who want to drive fast, who want to race or who have the urge to express themselves in a way that is clearly dangerous on the roads, can do so under supervision and in a structured framework that is safe should be considered.
There are other possibilities: how about a reward system that offers specific benefits or rewards to young drivers who remain penalty point free? The thing is to try to come up with constructive proposals that allow young drivers to feel that they are not simply being hunted.
Because there is every chance that they will respond very badly if they do feel they are being targeted and scape-goated unfairly. And that isn’t what we need, is it?