This newspaper noted in October 1969 that there was “surprisingly little public debate concerning the imminent introduction into this country of the use of an estimation of the level of alcohol in a drivers’ blood as a means of assessing his ability to drive a car”. The new initiative centred on the breathalyser and the blood and urine tests that would accompany it if necessary. If there was to be debate, it was also suggested, it would centre very much not “on matters of principle, but of technology” and the questions of accuracy and loopholes.

From the vantage point of today, the 1969 rules seem astonishingly lax. Even at the time, it was noted that the permitted limit of “125 mg per 100ml of blood” was “a generously liberal one – perhaps equivalent to six small whiskies or four pints of beer taken by an eleven stone man over a period of two hours”. I’m not sure about the strict accuracy of that, but today we would call that binge drinking. And today the legal limits are 50mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood for fully licensed drivers and 20mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood for professional, learner and novice drivers.

The new dawn in 1969 certainly did not inaugurate an era of vigilance; the then minister for health, Fianna Fáil’s Erskine Childers, remarked on the Irish determination........

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