WHEN FACED WITH a tragedy like the one that claimed the lives of five teenagers and critically jeopardised the lives of three women and a child last weekend, one hopes that something resembling real leadership will emerge from somewhere.

While the rest of the country was rapt by the senselessness and scale of the tragedy, only the minister for justice was thinking ahead. Jim O’Callaghan sprang into action, getting in front of the TV cameras, and proposing that it would be of some benefit to make it illegal to drive the wrong way down the motorway. 

The implicit suggestion here is that those five children who hurtled to their deaths on M9, endangering countless other innocent drivers, thought that what they were doing was perfectly legal. It isn’t, by the way. Driving a car the wrong way down the motorway at a high enough speed to instantly kill all five occupants is already against the law. Obviously. If neither that nor the threat of death did anything to stop those kids, then neither will making a slightly more specific law. Obviously. 

It is therefore no surprise that O’Callaghan’s tough talk has done less than nothing to deter others from doing the same in the nights that have followed. Dramatic irony kicked in almost instantly, and it has since been revealed that the practice has continued more or less unabated since O’Callaghan was, once again, caught in a state of reaction rather than proactivity.

In addition to a needless new law, O’Callaghan has also promised that gardaí will finally be trained in such chases. Not anytime soon, but some day. Next year, maybe. What a message to send to any would-be deathriders. We’re making the obviously illegal thing you’re doing illegal in a different way. Also, we have nobody capable of correctly enforcing that law. Let that be a lesson to you.

Far be it from me to question the wisdom of only realising that problems are problems after it’s too tragically late, but it seems somewhat self-evident that ideally we would be addressing this practice before it gets to the point........

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