Earlier this summer, yours truly was involved in a scary, but thankfully minor, road accident. It happened on the kind of road that litters the Irish countryside, and with which anybody who’s been driving in Ireland for more than six months will be familiar: it is a road that is too narrow for two cars to meet without one or the other voluntarily embedding the passenger side in the hedge and coming to a stop. There are very few straight sections, and many of the turns are close to 90 degrees. Given the Government’s (well intended) moratorium on hedgecutting which runs from spring to late autumn, the road is made narrower again in summer time, and the corners made harder again to see around. The speed limit, nevertheless, is 80kph. Or about as fast as a lorry can go at top speed on the M50.
In my case, it was on such a corner that the accident happened: two cars, coming in opposite directions, at a similar speed – neither of us in excess of the speed limit, it must be said – and seeing each other far too late to stop. To avoid a head-on crash, I embedded my car in the hedge with more force than the suspension was designed to take, and injuries and fatalities were thankfully avoided at the cost to just my insurance company.
I write this because of the report of the Mayo Coroner, Patrick O’Connor yesterday, which concluded that in the deaths of Aisling Moore and her daughter Abbigael, on July 2nd, the state of the road was a major contributing factor. The road – a section of the N26 between Foxford and Swinford – “is not fit for modern traffic”, the Coroner said.
That road, with which I am familiar, is a little bit wider than the one on which I live. Two modern cars can meet relatively safely, assuming both are driving reasonably – but things might get hairier with a lorry or a larger vehicle. Like many roads of its type, there is no hard shoulder, meaning there is no room to veer left if you meet something coming at speed and lack the room to avoid it. The speed limit is 100kph.
To be fair to the Irish Government, upgrading an entire national road network so that every road in the country might be fit for modern traffic is not the work of a single term in office, or indeed several. Some things, even in a democracy, a Government cannot reasonably be blamed for. The road on which I had my accident, for example, was clearly designed in an era when most of the traffic was equine, and only a very few people had motor cars. Those of us who live on it do not produce enough traffic to justify upgrading it to a two-laner, and even if we did the cost and engineering involved would be prohibitive.
All that said, it strikes me that there are things that can be done, chiefly around maintenance, road use, and speed limits.
One of the most dangerous roads in Ireland is old Kenmare road leaving Killarney and taking you deep into Killarney national park. From an initial two-laner as you leave town, it eventually becomes a windy, narrow track cut into the hillside, where two cars would struggle to meet. It is littered with blind crests and blind turns and has at least one very narrow tunnel through an overhanging rock.
The speed limit on that particular road, at least on the last occasion that I drove it, is 100kph – the same as the speed limit on the six-lane dual carriageway between the red cow roundabout and the turn off for Naas as you leave Dublin and sit endlessly waiting for the Motorway to arrive. The fact that two roads so remarkably different should have the same speed limit simply does not make sense – at least to me. It would strike me as vastly more sensible to increase the limit in Dublin to 120, while reducing the limit on the bad sections of the Killarney road – and indeed my own road – to 50 or 60kph.
Not everybody, of course, obeys the speed limit. But in part, I would argue, this is because in Ireland speed limits are rarely – except in urban areas – connected to safety. It is, self-evidently, not safe to drive on my own road at the speed limit, and it is, self-evidently, quite possible to drive safely over the speed limit on some national roads.
Were speed limits much more closely tied to the safety of our roads in the public mind, some drivers might be more inclined to take them seriously.
We could also do more than we are doing to maintain the roads. For example, if a road has a speed limit of 80kph or above, then having a pothole on such a road is criminal, since that road is evidently no longer safe to drive at the advertised speed. Similarly, while none of us would wish to disturb nesting birds, in some parts of the country the directive against hedgecutting in summer would appear to be directly making some roads marginally less safe. That should be looked at again.
As I was writing this article, I found it very hard to access any data on minor or non-fatal collisions on Irish roads – this too seems to me to be an error, since it is clearly evident that the more total collisions that occur, the more fatalities are likely to occur. In my youth, Irish roads used to have “accident black spot” signs at places where collisions were frequent. It might do no harm to bring those back as well.
Government cannot fix upgrade every road in the country. But the Coroner, I think, raises an important issue. And surely there is more we can do than simply wringing our hands?