IMPATIENCE, aggression, speed, carelessness. It’s the Wild West out there. People breaking red lights. Routinely smashing speed limits. Harassing and tail-gating the motorists who are not breaking speed limits.
Revving up and furiously passing out motorists who are obeying speed limits... no matter if it means crossing a continuous white line or approaching a corner on the wrong side of the road.
Refusing to wait for a few seconds behind a parked vehicle on their side of the road - instead shoving out and forcing oncoming traffic to give way to them.
Driving around with broken front headlights - at night! Not using indicators while changing lanes or entering or leaving on roundabouts. E-cyclists flaking through pedestrian zones.
Scarily young males driving scarily enormous tractors and trailers at extremely high speeds through villages and towns and along country roads at harvest time.
And - somehow this is the worst of all, young drivers, many of them female, aggressively revving up and deliberately driving at pedestrians, especially elderly people, who have had the misfortune to start crossing a road before the young driver came into view.
An 84-year-old told me this is a specifically regular occurrence with young female drivers in Bishopstown tearing up through Bishopscourt towards the main road near the Bishopstown bar.
Any surprise we’re experiencing an increase in pedestrian deaths?
Call it what you will. Road rage. Bad driving. Aggression. Entitlement. Contempt for other road users. I put it down to a screaming lack of gardaí on the roads.
I parked my car for a short period one morning near a residential area close to the city centre recently.
As I returned to my car, a procession of schoolchildren led by a teacher rounded the corner and walked along the pavement.
At the same time, a small car screamed up, did several high-velocity doughnuts on the road right beside the line of parked cars and the crocodile of schoolchildren - and then to my horror, pulled right in behind my vehicle, quite literally with its bonnet to my bumper.
As the young male driver got out and swaggered along the pavement, a male bystander shouted at him angrily, calling him a clown.
I stood there, mouth open.
Eventually, I asked the bystander to talk me through reversing out of the non-existent space left between the two cars by the doughnut-idiot.
All the while, the young fella strutted and swaggered. With the IQ and the attitude he was displaying, he shouldn’t have been allowed to drive a bumper-car at a carnival.
A few days ago, a young male driver – big red L-plates plastered all over his car – impatiently pulled out around a car parked on his side of the road outside the local post office, and nearly hit me. This entitled young plonker will, no doubt, avail of this situation which allows bottom-feeders like him to keep operating on learner permits without ever sitting a driving test.
So why the surprise that we’re experiencing an increase in pedestrian deaths? Why the chest-thumping and apparent horror that road deaths have jumped nearly 20% in the last year?
I cannot understand why the Taoiseach expressed such sorrow and concern at the spiraling road deaths at the opening of the final section of the Macroom bypass a few weeks before Christmas… why, I ask, is this issue so suddenly such a matter of “enormous concern?”
Anybody who’s routinely driving Irish roads – local roads, main roads, town and city through-roads, narrow winding rural roads, motorways – over the last two to four years surely can’t have missed the massive rise in motorist aggression and careless, dangerous driving.
Drivers won’t obey speed limits, won’t give way to other drivers, won’t slow down for pedestrians, and take the most hair-raising short-cuts, apparently oblivious to the risk they run of taking a life.
Almost without exception, younger drivers, male and female, are an absolute horror to deal with. They have no respect for other road-users and they assume – rightly - that there will be no garda patrol cars out on the roads to call a halt to their high-speed shenanigans, whether drunk or sober.
Anyone driving after sundown must surely have noticed the amount of cars, lorries and vans driving around with broken front headlights.
Is it any coincidence that all of this is happening while the number of gardaí in the roads policing units have fallen by 13% since 2021?
Cork is one of the counties where roads policing units lost even more gardaí last year.
Will it really be such a coincidence if road deaths continue to rise in tune with the policy to focus more and more gardaí on Dublin following the riots last November?
One honestly gets so weary of the Taoiseach “demanding” action and his ministers “vowing” to enforce tough crackdowns, and various politicians “committing” to tackling road deaths while old pedestrians continue to be afraid to cross even minor roads and the rest of us are becoming increasingly nervous about driving.
Good God, haven’t they realised these big bank holiday road policing displays are a joke?
What we need is lots of gardaí out on the roads, urban and rural, every day and every night with the technology and resources they need. That’d put a stop to a lot of the speeding, the bullying and the insane life-endangering carelessness that’s happening every moment on our roads.
After that, the government could look at the more long-term issues such as disqualification loopholes, driver education and the state of the roads.
But the main and the urgent problem is lack of policing. It’s that simple.
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