Unless you’ve been living under a rock in recent weeks, you will have heard that the Irish Government is considering a far-reaching reform of road speed limits to slow us all down, and protect lives on the roads. As policies go, it is likely to be one of those – much like the carbon tax or the USC – that provokes much muttered grumbling from Irish voters, but little by the way of action. We have become sadly used to just putting up with a lot of this stuff in recent years, because we have been told by the great and the good that it is necessary, and because few people have the energy or the inclination to devote themselves full-time to campaigning against it.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting the state’s willful hypocrisy whenever that arises, and yesterday, the Irish Times gave us a worthy example of same:
Up to 30,000 people on their third or subsequent learner permit have never sat a driving test and in some cases may have been driving for almost 30 years without ever holding a full licence.
The figures emerged after the Road Safety Authority examined records of learner permit holders back to 1994, following inquiries from The Irish Times.
This data show tens of thousands of learner motorists on their third or subsequent permit since 2018 have been driving for many years without ever sitting a test.
It should be remembered that the purpose of the driving test is, firstly and foremostly, a matter of road safety: It is designed to ensure that all of us who drive cars – which are lethal weapons in the wrong, or incompetent hands – are competent to drive them and understand the rules of the road. If we simply abolished the driving test tomorrow, it might logically be expected that driving standards would fall and road deaths would rise.
And yet the Government appears perfectly comfortable with the fact that there are tens of thousands of people on Irish roads who have never taken a driving test and who, in many cases, never will. Indeed, some of these people will have failed their driving test, on multiple occasions.
So why are they still driving?
The answer, simply put, is that in Irish politics it is much easier to make everybody slightly miserable than to make some people very miserable. Taking driving licences away from those who had not passed their test inside a reasonable timeframe would likely result in many families being deeply inconvenienced – a parent who could no longer legally drop their kids to school, or take a sick parent to a hospital appointment. Those hard cases then become features on the news, everybody feels bad for them, and politicians become villains.
By contrast, reducing the speed limits might make everybody slightly miserable, but you won’t get many sob stories from people who have been desperately affected. You can pretend that the misery is in a virtuous cause, and be reasonably certain that the people cursing you in their cars won’t feel singled out by your actions.
In reality, though, removing the driving licences of those who had failed their test and not re-applied within six months, or removing the licence for a period of ten years from those who had failed, say, three consecutive tests, would likely do far more for driving standards and road safety. Alternatively – though this would be horrendously unpopular – you could make everybody re-take their driving test every 15 or 20 years to establish that they still understood the rules of the road. Personally, I think I could live with that, so long as it also applied to cyclists.
But in the round, Government is perfectly comfortable with the present state of affairs because for all their talk about public safety, that comes entirely second place to their concern for their own popularity. And so, we have a situation where absurd reductions in speed limits are being openly considered, but addressing the tens of thousands of unqualified drivers on the roads is not.
If it occasionally appears on these pages as if some of us have difficulty taking Government policy seriously, then that’s simply one example of why.