Treat icy roads and fellow drivers with the respect they deserve

By Noel Baker

Monday, January 04, 2010

ELEVEN years ago, almost to the day, I had a lucky escape after an encounter with an icy road.

Trundling home from a friend’s house in west Cork some time after 11pm, I drove too quickly into a corner on the road between Bandon and Enniskeane and the next thing I knew I was viewing the world from a different perspective – an upside down one.

Miraculously, the trusty family car left the road, spun in the air and landed on its four wheels next to the ditch, engine revving. The only evidence of its airborne trajectory was the petrol hatch, which was completely concertina-ed.

After checking that I was still in one piece I was able to walk away unharmed, and head into a nearby house to make a sheepish call to my father to check whether he could collect me. Many people in the same situation are not as lucky.

Ever since, I’ve known to treat icy roads with the respect that they deserve – but try telling that to some of the other road users I encountered yesterday morning as I made my way through a snowy Phoenix Park.

Europe’s largest urban park had turned into Europe’s largest ice rink, with the main road running through it caked in fresh white ice on one side and barely passable on the other.

Nevertheless, car after car, their drivers seemingly alarmed that they couldn’t make like Jeremy Clarkson and plough through the Park in top gear, overtook on the right hand side, often with a look of disdain as I took the slowcoach route. One person even tried – but thankfully backed away from – overtaking at a roundabout.

The coup de grace, however, was a carload of women in their early 20s, who overtook on the inside – virtually in front of the entrance to Garda HQ – and followed it up by giving me the finger.

Aside from a natural urge to attack the car and its contents with a wheel brace, the overwhelming feeling I had was disgust. A lack of manners is nothing new in modern Irish society, but some people appear to lose all reason when they get behind the wheel of a car, somehow believing that instead of taking their motor for a spin they are crashing a tank through a roadblock outside Basra or racing through the streets of Monte Carlo.

The recent response of people to the needs of communities whose homes and businesses were wrecked by flooding showed that there is still decency about, despite the country being ravaged by job losses, economic meltdown and the excesses and arrogance of modern life.

But as the car full of erect fingers ploughed on through the ice and nearly careered into the back of the next vehicle in front, it was hard not to think that what really has the country on the skids is a people getting uglier by the second.

This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, January 04, 2010