Every day now we’re hearing more and more about the deaths on Irish roads. While the cause is usually attributed to alcohol and speed, many people are dying on the roads due to the poor infrastructure that has failed them. At this point in time, there are more people dead in Ireland from road traffic accidents in 2006, than there are days actually elapsed in 2006.
Last year a phenomenal number of people died on our roads, but still, these numbers are far lower than the numbers in the 1960s and 1970s. Cars have become safer, even if they’ve become ubiquitous. Cars today must pass stringent safety checks, rigorous quality control standards and if all else fails, a mickey-mouse effort National Car Test that seems to fail cars with nothing wrong with them apart from cosmetic things like light-bulbs, in favour of early 1990s deathtrap machines.
So that pretty much rules out the vast majority of cars. Next, to this ridiculous notion that young male drivers are most at ‘risk’. I’d like to pose the question, has anyone looked at the proportionality of car owners and cross referenced this with crashes as distinguished by sex?? The fact as I see it is, and there’s proof, more men that women leave school early or after their Leaving Certificate and work in the trades, or in the case of many areas of Dublin, the dole. Therefore, more men seem to have cars. Insurance companies latched onto this years ago, and when times were tough, they loaded on all these fees for male drivers, thus making millions on a small group of people and bolstering their balance sheets. This drove (pardon the pun) young male drivers to the edge, and they opted for cheaper second-hand cars which were to a large degree unsafe. This, coupled with their natural primal instincts, created the buzz from driving fast. Thus, with a large proportion of one sex driving around, naturally the collisions occur… and because of the poor quality cars they were forced to drive, a large amount died in these crashes.
Today, the proportionality is moving more to the other side, with more and more women buying cars or receiving cars as presents from ‘Daddy’ (or in parts of Dublin, ‘Dod’). These people have, due to a freak genetic mutation leaving them female, cheaper car insurance, thanks to a sexist ploy to get rich quick by insurance companies in the early 1990s. This leads me to what could now be the cause of more and more accidents in modern Ireland.
Women. It seems to me that more and more accidents are being attributed to testosterone-driven males. Be it the chick in the passenger seat, the girl he’s driving to visit because he was summoned to do so, or the needlessly sad furore of the guy who puts ridiculous additives to his poor car to hopelessly attract a dim-witted lady friend to sit with him, with the sole intention of making him happy in his pants. In the last batch of road-safety ads in Ireland, it was the girl texting the boy who got killed by the blue Ford Transit. She led him to believe he might get a kiss after school at the bus stop. In another one, it was the girl who waved convincingly at the Renault Mégane Coupé driver that caused him to kill the child who’s stupid mother left standing in the middle of a busy street. In previous year’s ads, the driver of the red Citroen ZX crashed into a lovely yellow digger machine because the girl in the passenger seat squeezed his knee and seemed excited when he sped up. Even the latest advertisement where we see a man chatting up a girl in a bar is seen to be led by his penis as he traverses the possibilities of his actions if he drank and drove. These are all subtle hints the Safety Council are trying to get across, but can’t explicitly say, because it would be politically incorrect to accuse women of causing crashes - whereas males are the subject of traditional slating. Women are widely accused of having poor judgement, bad hand-eye co-ordination and are more likely to use mobile phones, make-up apparatuses and drink coffee and play with the CD Player while driving than men. Women are less observant and while they re-act quickly (just as quickly as males) they are more jerky and not completely in control of their vehicles. Political correctness also plays a part here too, and many members of An Gárda Síochána must be petrified of the wrath of a feminist-like woman whom they (the Gárdaí) rightly confront about their driving patterns. It seems men are doomed in this light.
Alcohol is the latest craze to be blamed on accidents, because let’s face it, we can’t blame the girls! The National Safety Council have televised advertisements in this regard too, causing an Opel Vectra to do something it could never do, spin six-feet in the air, knock a timber fence and kill a child. While the message is clear, the delivery on that one was particularly exaggerated. In this regard however, I detest those who take the wheel of a mechanically-propelled vehicle while under the influence of alcohol - even if it is within the legal limit. In my view, the legal limit should be zero, with deviations allowed on the basis of an individual’s ability to process alcohol. This is fast becoming a serious problem, but again the problem is varied and complex. There’re arguments for and against, however I feel none justify well enough the reality of a person who drinks and drives. One major argument which I would support individually - as in devoid of the context of drink driving - is that of the transport costs for taxis and other sources.
Which leads me to the main reason there are so many crashes in the Republic of Ireland - the road network. Ireland has a notoriously bad road infrastructure, with cat-eye lights adorning less than about a third of the road system here. While people in Dublin won’t have a clue what I’m on about, the other two-thirds of Irish people who don’t live there will (yes, that’s right, the MAJORITY of people aren’t from Dublin - I’m not surprised you would’ve thought otherwise). Outside of the area formerly known as the “Pale”, roads are very, very poor in condition. Kerry for example, the county in which I was born, roads are very poor. While major routes are in good condition to a degree, roads which are used by most people, i.e, secondary and tertiary roads, are abysmal. Connemara is no worse off and so is the rest of the country. While I can’t comment on other county’s roads apart from Kerry and parts of Tipperary, Local Government in Kerry are completely inept when it comes to road planning (and planning in general to be honest.) Roads in Kerry are very poor, and while there’s plenty of money to get the job done, millions of euro each year are ‘pissed away’ (for the want of a better description) repairing sections of road that are perfectly fine. The root cause of the poor roads is the type of rock used to lay road surfaces with, which was supplied from a poor-quality source under questionable circumstances for years. Now, the sandstone roads are dissolving (I wonder why) and they have to be re-done. Asphalt is a luxury in Kerry, and even Tralee town, the principle town of Kerry, has concrete streets.
But enough of the slating of Local Government in Kerry County, they have a hard life already what with meeting every second month and talking about such things as the temperature of the coffee in the cups delivered to their chamber desks. Road infrastructure should be blamed for the majority of car accidents. Other things such as speed are a fundamental contributory factor too, but I see speed as something that just cannot be tackled, and I think laying blame solely on it is taking the simple way out. Our road network is on a par with third-world countries, our infrastructure planners are from an era where they walked to school barefoot and as such don’t understand modern compounds such as rubberised-asphalt and things such as engineering and levels.
Insurance companies are making a killing (pun) on the plight of the poor Irishman who’s only wrong is his taste in clothing (mainly the ‘chav’ look) who is forced to drive cars that aren’t fit for anything other than explosion, driven by the mind-games of uncoordinated women that they largely don’t understand, driving on roads that not only have poor drainage, but don’t have the capacity to provide enough friction to keep rubber tyres from slipping - let alone cat-eye lights to aid night-time driving. All this collectively causes crashes.
It’s not as simple as that I know, but at least I’m highlighting some of the reasons - watch the news tonight on TV3 (because the ‘other’ news is badly presented) and you’ll be led to believe it’s the young male driver. But what of the poor-quality car? The girl he was travelling with/to? The bad roads? The stupid fixtures on his poor-quality car? The bad road planning? The price of insurance that caused him to buy a poor-quality car?
diarmy
To my delight, my BlackBerry lifestyle has returned, in a new shade of fashion. I’m now the owner and operator of a Blackberry 7100x from O2.
The name ‘CrackBerry’ has become synonymous with BlackBerry, the email phenomenon that is gripping the western world by storm. In the US, BlackBerry is big business, and it’s becoming a bit of a craze in Europe. But it’s no secret that Research In Motion, BlackBerry’s parent company, is in a patent dispute in the US over the ‘push’ technology behind the email craze. This could very well mean the end of BlackBerry in the United States but Europe is free to move in the BlackBerry step.
