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If the Government was as serious as it professes to be about reducing deaths on the roads, it would have a minister for road safety.
And it could do worse than have Rosemary Smith as that minister. Because some 5,000 young people out there are better drivers as a result of her dedication to saving lives.
That’s what she does. Saves lives and makes the roads safer for all of us. And she’s been doing it for five years without a penny of the billions in motor-related taxes raked in by the state in that time.
Her ‘Think Awareness’ driving programme for Transition Year students has been availed of by some 150 schools, either on their own grounds or at Tattersalls car park in Fairyhouse.
Her dream is to have a fully-equipped full-time driving school for young people on a 90-acre site in Co Meath. She has shared that dream with members of the Government and with people in the private sector.
So far, only the private sector has come through with real commitment for the project.
In her very direct way, Rosemary Smith has told the Government to ‘get off its hands’ and do something real to help stop what its ministers regularly decry as the ‘carnage’ on our roads.
On the occasion of Skoda announcing its own support for her ‘Think Awareness’ programme, she told minister for education and science Dr Michael Woods that she ‘would hold him to’ a promise he had just publicly made to ‘support the programme in any way I can’.
“There’s a lot of money floating around in this Government at the moment,” she said. “I’m beseeching Bertie Ahern to put some of it into this driving school for young people before there are another 500 casualties among them.”
As the minister had just minutes before bemoaned the fact that 31 young people were killed on Irish roads in the first two months of the year - ‘wasted lives’, he said, quite rightly - one feels she might have had a receptive audience.
“Get up off your hands and DO something,” she said directly to the Cabinet through Dr Woods. “WE’RE already doing something.”
Rosemary’s proposed school is the kind of facility which has long been available in many other countries. In addition to lecture and demonstration rooms, it would have a driving circuit with examples of all kinds of road surfaces and conditions, and a skid pan to give students experience of dealing with emergencies in a safe environment.
“If we’re to make any dent in the horrifying statistics at all, we’ve got to get the drivers young,” she says. “That’s when they learn fast. It’s the one chance there is to get them to learn it right.”
The National Safety Association’s Eddie Shaw likes to use a statistical forecast that in eight years’ time 1,000 of this year’s Leaving Cert students will have been killed on Ireland’s roads.
That kind of thing is OK for shock headlines. But shock headlines don’t teach better driving. When he adds that what is needed is a change in attitude by drivers, he is closer to the point.
And the real point is that Rosemary Smith and her team have been doing just that for five years.
Minister Woods is shortly expecting a report from consultants commissioned by the National Roads Authority with suggestions for a driving curriculum which might be made available to schools in the future.
Rosemary Smith and her team have been doing just that for five years.
Government ministers keep saying ‘the carnage has got to stop’. As do safety and other relevant agencies. As have the grieving parents of too many children dead before their time.
For five years, Rosemary Smith and her team have been doing their damnedest to stop it.
And when she makes some very sensible suggestions, Government ministers who sit on their hands in the back seats of garda-chauffered cars should be doing more than listening.
Getting off ONE hand long enough to hand over some cash support is the least that could be done. Even in politicians’ own self-interest.
“Any government that actually comes up and supports the concept with money instead of merely words will reap the votes of the parents of young people about to go out on our roads,” she says.
Ahhh ... now THERE’S a thought to loosen the purse-strings.
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