A zero-tolerance campaign to target rogue drivers is needed

I was feeling unaccountably cheerful.

For the first time in more months than I can remember, I’d completed a car journey without a single scary incident.

Nobody had torn out through a junction without looking and almost hit me.

Nobody had revved up far above the speed limit and overtaken me on a corner and across a continuous white line.

I didn’t have to flash my hazards in protest at a speeding, bullying motorist who was harassing and tailgating me because I was obeying the speed limit.

It was a long time, I realised, since I’d driven out my gate and not felt terrified at some point.

Alas, the hiatus didn’t last.

Next day, a young driver scorched through a T-junction without looking and almost hit me. We both slammed on the brakes just in time.

The day after that, one of those huge, extra-long international trucks pulled into the side of the road ahead of me, stopping on an incline, near a corner, its hazard lights flashing.

As I approached, the driver emerged from his cab, examined something under the truck, looked up, saw the traffic coming, and climbed back in.

His right indicator flashed and the vehicle started to slowly move back out into the road.

I paused to let him out.

But that wasn’t good enough for the two tradesman’s vans travelling behind me.

Despite the fact that this gargantuan lorry was pulling out onto a road which clearly sported a continuous white line and was approaching the top of a hill, both vans overtook me and it.

I watched, aghast, as the two boyos accelerated out around me and the lorry, remaining in the wrong lane for many, many heart-stopping seconds.

Hatred rose in me. Their arrogance, their entitlement, their brutish impatience at being momentarily inconvenienced. Their callous refusal to acknowledge how they could have so easily injured or killed somebody else.

I betcha those knuckle-draggers went home after work and expressed righteous disapproval at the latest update on the road carnage on the evening news.

At the end of July, those killed on our roads reached 113 - a dozen or so more than in the first seven months of last year.

And untold numbers of us are coming far too close for comfort.

A friend of mine was driving home from the beach with some young children in the back of the car. To her horror, she noticed an approaching SUV drifting into her side of the road. My friend beeped her horn and flashed her lights.

The SUV came closer, closer, closer, until my friend, who by this point was pulling into the side of the road to get out of the way, could see that the driver wasn’t even aware - she was gazing down at the phone in her hand.

At the very last moment the other driver looked up.

A casual wave, a flick of the steering wheel, and she was back in her own lane and gone. Not a bother on her.

Another friend reported how she was in a line of traffic driving along a dual carriageway when a car drove straight through a junction.

Someone else reported how, when she came off the Ballincollig slip road onto the N22 heading into Cork, an oncoming lorry refused to move into the other lane to let her out onto the main road.

The driver kept heading straight at her. She did nose out, but the lorry driver kept accelerating up behind her, tailgating and harassing her. Eventually, bored by the cat-and-mouse game, he moved into the outer lane and roared away, leaving her trembling.

But who saw? Who cared? Who did anything about it?

Nearly four people a week are being killed on our roads.

The former Minister with Responsibility for Road Safety, Jack Chambers, had a seat at the Cabinet table, but he didn’t have a vote. Minister Chambers has since been moved to the Finance portfolio.

His replacement, James Lawless, doesn’t even have a seat at Cabinet.

What does that tell you about government priorities?

We need a deadly serious, zero-tolerance campaign against the thousands of rogue motorists who are normalising extremely dangerous driving behaviour.

We need loads of garda road traffic patrols on the roads, making a big point of continually pulling people over and delaying them - because how people really and truly hate to be inconvenienced in any way, these days - and making it, through sheer force of numbers and unremitting surveillance, a high probability that if you speed or take risks, you will be caught, delayed, vastly inconvenienced, and punished.

Dangerous drivers must be caught in the act. They have to be stopped and penalised for the insane speeding and the aggressive, crazy behaviour that is now routine on Irish roads.

New penalty points legislation is being enacted later this year to target speeding and the failure to wear seat belts.

Increased sanctions for driving under the influence of drink or drugs as well as mandatory drug testing at the scenes of collisions are on the way.

But how can you realistically practically make any of this work unless there are massive numbers of garda traffic patrols, 24/7 out there getting the message across?

And it’s not just the motorways.

Cross-country rat-runs such as the one that starts from the Cork-Macroom road at Crookstown and runs west through Beal na mBlath to the main road at Enniskeane/ Ballineen, leading on to Dunmanway, Drimoleague and Bantry have become death traps.

Motorists, lorries, and boy-racers are travelling at extreme speeds on rural roads like this.

In the space of just five years, our road environment has deteriorated so much that we have gone from winning EU awards for road safety to being a European road safety blackspot.

We have to get this runaway horse back into the stable.