What's the news?
Sadly, so far more people have died on the roads this year than last. Up to the 21st of July, 43 drivers, 18 passengers, 16 pedestrians, 11 motorcyclists and five cyclists have been killed on Irish roads. Driver deaths have increased by 10 per cent and passenger deaths have increased by 29 per cent. That's seven more people killed as a result of accidents, foolishness and bad driving. For more than a decade now, Irish roads have been getting safer and safer, reducing the awful toll that stalked the early 2000s. What's worrying is that this recent uptick is largely due to alcohol, and largely due to younger drivers ignoring drink-driving laws and advice.
Chief Superintendent Aidan Reid, An Garda Síochána said: "we appeal to the public to be responsible in relation to drinking and driving, especially coming into August. Never, ever drink and drive. Never take a lift from someone who has been drinking and make every effort to dissuade that drink driver from driving - if necessary contact the Gardaí. You could be saving a life, yours, theirs or someone else's."
So far this year, 38 per cent of all road deaths have been attributed to alcohol and there has been a 50 per cent rise in deaths at weekends, a time when many more people tend to take the risk of drinking and driving. Worse still, according to the RSA, the proportion of younger drivers being killed as a result of alcohol intake is on the rise.
"You would tend to think that drink driving issues are a residual effect from an older driving population," Maggie Martin, Research Manager of the Road Safety Authority (RSA) told CompleteCar. "But it's not. Actually, the biggest problem we have is with the 16-24-year-old age group. Once they get more than 100mg of alcohol in their systems, they leave every other age group in the dust. They make up by far the biggest majority of alcohol-related road deaths."
The problem, says Ms Martin, is multi-layered. The warnings and the graphic adverts, which have been a staple of the Irish media for decades, are simply not getting through to them. "I didn't pay much attention to the news when I was that age, and there's a new crop of motorists coming on to our roads every year. Somewhere along the line, they've stopped paying attention. They're enmeshed with social media now, so that's where we at the RSA are now directing a lot more effort."
There's not even much point in putting up scary posters in pubs - according to Ms Martin, much of the drinking is taking place at home now, not least because of the lower cost of alcohol bought for off-sale, and there's even driving between homes for multiple drinking sessions. They're well hammered by the time they get to the pub.
Just under one-third of all fatal collisions involved a driver or motorcyclist with excessive alcohol in their systems, but pedestrians are not immune either. Especially in rural areas, Ms Martin says that those choosing to walk home with a skinful are at risk. "I live in a rural area, so I know that it can be hard to get a taxi at night, but it's all about personal responsibility. Plan how you're going to get home and don't leave it to chance. Even with the rural issue, the county with the highest number of fatalities involving drunk pedestrians was Dublin, where there's no shortage of taxis. Inevitably you're going to be a bit unsteady if you've had a drink, but some people were actually just lying down, flat-out drunk, in the middle of the road."
It's not just an issue of having one sneaky drink and assuming you'll be fine either. Half of all fatal collisions involving alcohol involved someone with more than four times the legal limit in their systems.
Why are we still doing this to ourselves? How is it that 40 years of warnings have failed to more than temporarily stem the tide of getting behind the wheel or the handlebars when we're out of our heads on drink? "We tend to talk about addiction strictly as an individual trait. Is Ireland a nation of addicts? I would say not, by and large, just as I would say not everyone who gets behind the wheel while above the limit is doing so due to an alcohol dependency" Dr John Moriarty, of Queens University Belfast's Centre For Public Health told us. "But as a nation, has Ireland got a collective dependency on alcohol? To some extent, probably we do.
"There's been some brilliant research by Daniel Regan of UCD on Irish people's negative attitudes to non-drinkers and I think it's important we all examine how closely we equate drinking with positive ideas like generosity, fun and relaxation. Why would being out without drinking or with someone else who isn't drinking make it harder to relax? It may be that gateway point of 'I'll have one so as not to be seen to be boring or dry or stingy' where problems can start.
"Once we're drinking, we're a lot more susceptible to what's sometimes referred to as "wilful blindness". When we screen out evidence which contradicts what we want to believe, i.e. that we're fine, in no way impaired and no threat, we end up with a biased view of how well we're functioning. If we don't have information to weigh against that, we're more susceptible to act on that biased evidence. To me, that's the role of a good awareness campaign - to interrupt self-serving thought sequences which lead us to bad and potentially fatal decisions."
The problem is that there is certainly a perception that the Gardai are actually not out in force. Perception or reality, the thinking in a lot of people's heads is that cutbacks made to the force during the recession has greatly diminished the likelihood of bumping into a patrol car or a checkpoint, so more risks are being taken. The taking of alcohol, as a cause of accident, rose from 15 per cent of fatal collisions in 2007 to 20 per cent now, and surely it cannot be a coincidence that funding for the Garda was falling for most of that period. The RSA tactfully declined to comment directly on that issue, but one senior staffer did say that "if there is a Garda presence that there is that threat of enforcement. We did get the numbers down but they've gone back up again, so clearly there's some issue at work there."
Perhaps the best deterrent to drink driving is to listen to Ms Martin, though. A mother of two, she frequently found herself brought to tears by the fact that these are not faceless numbers, these are people. "They all started out there night full of excitement, full of happiness, and then either were killed needlessly or killed someone else needlessly and now have to live with that terrible fact. I think that there is hope, though. If you really aim hard at something like this and target it effectively, then you can have an effect. But you can't become complacent. None of us can."