THAT Eddie Shaw seems to be a driven Old Testament prophet

When the retiring Chairman of a State body gets himself hated by the Cabinet in his final days in office, that’s surprising.

When the retiring chairman of a State body gets himself hated by almost everybody in politics other than David Norris, that’s astonishing.

Departing chairpersons go gently, murmuring modestly about what their boards achieved under their aegis. It’s all very civilised.

Usually.

The current exception seems determined not to go gently anywhere, but, instead, to give the door a hell of a kick on his way out. Now that he’s in the final few weeks of his chairmanship, he’s turning up at Government committees - two last week - not to claim success, but to announce failure and publicly grieve over it. His pattern is to lay the blame equitably across all political parties and then go on a radio programme to further annoy those he has just irritated in the committee room.

His success level can be measured questions other people get asked about him. “Do you know that Eddie Shaw?” is classic. You wait for the end of the sentence: “Do you know that Eddie Shaw is Chairman of the National Safety Council?” but it never arrives. It becomes clear the demonstrative pronoun “that” is being used as a differentiator: you’re being asked if you’re acquainted with the definitively awful Eddie Shaw, as opposed to perfectly normal likeable Eddie Shaws who are just unlucky enough to have the same name as THAT Eddie Shaw.

THAT Eddie Shaw seems to misunderstand the nature of State body chairmanship. Governments want the chairpeople they appoint to have political judgment. Political judgment means not putting stuff in writing if it can be quietly murmured, never walking your Minister into anything and above all, remembering the prime obligation to dance with them as brung you: attacking the Government which appointed you is a no-no. If all this can be done in relative anonymity, all the better. That way, the minister can take credit for anything achieved by the state body involved.

From the outset, THAT Eddie Shaw eschewed anonymity, although, give him his due, he didn’t run around media exposing his personal habits to everybody. He didn’t appear much in columns testifying to his fitness regime, food favourites, TV preferences or collections of art or vintage cars. For all the public knows, he’s a couch potato living on Chinese takeouts, watching only Wife-Swap and collecting antique thimbles.

Instead of learning about his private life, the public has learned to associate him with any road-crash tragedy, publication of traffic statistics or announcement of garda drink-driving crackdowns. At the drop of an announcement, he’ll be on radio, his impassioned yet hushed voice giving the impression that he’s half Old Testament prophet, half worried aunt.

At the moment, though, there’s no half and half. He’s 100% Old Testament prophet. Going in to The Joint Committee on Enterprise and Small Business and the Joint Committee on Transport last week, he didn’t just threaten them with future death and destruction, he blamed them for present- day death and destruction on the roads.

He talked of the “spectacular failure” of an essentially good policy, causing “needless and preventable tragedies”.

Roughly 380 people will die on our roads this year and about 3,000 will be seriously injured, according to his calculations. “That’s 144 deaths and about 1,200 serious injuries more than it should be,” he said. “These deaths and injuries are entirely preventable. We know exactly what to do to reduce this carnage to a minimum. We also know from objective research that doing so is economically and socially beneficial to the Exchequer, to the Government and to Society. It is the classic Common Good.”

Opposition members of the various committees thus addressed - people like Labour’s Roisin Shortall - must have been purring softly with delight, to hear the Cabinet so skewered. Way hey: another stinker to be laid like a wreath at the door of the Government. So what does THAT Eddie Shaw do? He gets promiscuous. Turns around and skewers the opposition in mid-purr.

“This is not a criticism of Government alone,” he tells them. “This process failure is something every elected politician is aware of and tolerates or supports - by silence, by acquiescence. It is a failure of good people doing nothing.”

At this point in the encounter, rumour hath it that one of the opposition committee members gave him a terse corrective lecture on the function of opposition being to oppose and bite lumps out of the Government. From the high moral ground, where he has squatter’s rights, THAT Eddie Shaw replied that in some situations, where the common good is manifest and the route to it inescapable, it is the duty of an opposition to support rational and effective implementation of good Government-originated policy. Naah, went the response. Oppositions exist to hold Governments accountable. Mr Shaw promptly parsed the word “accountability” which, he stated, was wrongly interpreted by politicians as meaning “blame” rather than “responsibility”.

“If you use what I have said today in this way you are playing politics with peoples lives and some of those people are dying as you play,” he concluded.

It was then that David Norris enthusiastically detached himself from the consensus, as David Norris is wont to do.

“Bravo!” he said, thereby raising the social tone several notches. (Be honest. How often does one hear “Bravo!” uttered within Leinster House?) History doesn’t record what THAT Eddie Shaw said in parting from the committee. He may have said no more than “See ya” since he was to be heard on George Hook’s radio programme shortly thereafter, explaining how the initial success of speed cameras and license points evaporated when the public copped on that the odds of successful lawbreaking are still heavily tilted towards the lawbreaker. Hook described the interview, (after the interviewee had gone off, in his promiscuous way, to share himself with Matt Cooper,) as the finest exposition of complexity he, Hook had ever heard.

Cooper didn’t sound quite so bought- in, perhaps because THAT Eddie Shaw, in his relentless pursuit of unpopularity, got prissy with him in the middle of a question involving the phrase “road accidents.” They weren’t accidents, he told Cooper. They were collisions. Even though it was radio, you could clearly see Cooper closing his eyes and breathing deeply to summon up some patience in the face of this spontaneous tutorial.

What THAT Eddie Shaw has going for him is courage, lucidity, relentlessness and an almost religious sense of mandate. He believes passionately in the moral obligations for Government and individual citizen alike of the road safety data. He is convinced we could radically reduce deaths and maimings on the road by good investment and project-management.

He doesn’t care about being liked, which saves time he might otherwise need to devote to compromising, and frees him to be a permanent pain in the posterior.

Well, OK, delete the word “permanent”, since, in a few weeks’ time he’ll relinquish his chairmanship, although it’s doubtful if he’ll ever relinquish his magnificent obsession with road safety.

Public discourse and road safety will be the poorer for his departure.