Politicians must show leadership to prove conviction on drink driving

YOU’RE stopped by a garda who says he smells drink from you. You’re charged with driving under the influence.

You get yourself a great lawyer who finds a 20-minute loophole in the legislation and you're off the hook. That's what you get when you hire a really high-flying legal eagle. Hire one of those discount legal sparrows and where would you be?

In rather a better position, it might perversely be suggested. To have been convicted would have meant a one-day name-and-shame story. To have the case quashed keeps your name, your job, wife's name, the price of your house and its location in the papers for a week or more, in stories every one of which is associated with the drink-driving issue. If I were the man at the centre of this stinker, I would be very unhappy at the outcome. Paying a fine and losing my licence for two years would be a whole lot easier than having my name associated for all time with a drink-driving loophole.

Now, of course, the Government's legal advisers have to come up with some way of bunging the barrel so that nine thousand other drivers accused of DUI don't escape through the hole. What's puzzling is the general acceptance that nine thousand is a huge number, when in fact it's minuscule, set against the drink-driving problem we know we have.

In one recent year, around twelve thousand people were charged with this offence. Now, we have in Ireland around fourteen thousand licensed premises. Which means that fewer than one person per pub per year is charged with driving their lethal weapon while under the influence. Less than one drunk driver per pub per year. Yet the word on the street is that the gardaí are everywhere, breathalising (or intoxilising) every second driver.

Who are we kidding? Short answer: us. We are getting uptight about the possibility that the clever legal angle used last week may let 9,000 escape punishment for endangering the rest of us. What we should be doing is asking why the figure is as low as 9,000.

The answer lies in the rules the gardaí have to obey before they pull a driver over. They have to have 'formed an opinion' that a driver is over the limit. Forming that opinion is easy only when the driver is really well-tore, at which point the car is likely to grossly exceed the speed limit and to be driven so erratically that the problem is obvious. It's not so easy when the driver is enough over the limit to be dangerous, but not enough over the limit to be obvious. Dangerous but not obvious. That's all you have to be, in order to be safe from breath-testing, because without evidence to justify them forming an opinion that you're over the limit, garda hands are tied. Despite the widespread public belief that the gardaí are out there ready to hop on any careful driver with a thimbleful of dry sherry in them, the reality is otherwise, as proven by the data. Take a look, for instance, at the results from those breathalysed in the year 2000: 91% were over the legal limit. A third of them had more than twice the permitted amount of alcohol in them. They were, in short, very, very drunk. The gardaí, as evidenced by these cases, are doing what the law permits them to do: to catch a few of the obviously drunk.

It wouldn't be a bad end result if we were a fairly sober society, which we're not, by a mile. The Interim Report of the Strategic Task Force on Alcohol, published this time last year, showed that, in ten years, we'd gone from eleventh place in Europe in the drinks-per-person scale to second place. That's a fast catch-up. Given the strength of the trend and the sophisticated support of the drinks industry, the chances are good we may yet top that poll. It beggars belief that the people doing the drinking are all going home in taxis or employing designated drivers.

The fact that we're drinking so much may explain how confused we are on this whole issue. We believe drink-driving to be an evil second only to child sex abuse. Yet we tie the hands of the gardaí by allowing them to breath-test only those who have practically run up a flag reading: "The driver of this vehicle is demonstrably drunk as a skunk." And, despite all our self-righteous condemnation of drink driving, despite all our warm approbation of MADD, despite the sad little bouquets at the side of the road commemorating a recent victim (40% of road fatalities involve alcohol) we punish on one occasion with the loss of their seat any politician who tries to act on our expressed outrage.

According to a recent survey commissioned by the National Safety Council and conducted by Lansdowne Market Research, Drinking and Driving is the single biggest threat to road safety in Ireland in the opinion of those surveyed. According to the same survey, an overwhelming majority of people in Ireland (96%) believe there should be much more breath-testing of drivers to combat the problem.

"Continuous high volume effective appropriate enforcement," is what the National Safety Council wants. Translation: frequent random breath-testing. Further translation: breath-testing even of those not wearing, by their behaviour, a warm invitation for such testing. They do it elsewhere. Sweden, with a population of just under 9 million, breath-tested one in every nine in one recent year, and had only 150 alcohol related fatalities on the road. The same year, Ireland breath-tested only those drivers about whom the gardaí had 'formed an opinion' and had 160 alcohol related deaths on the road. Half the population, more than the number of deaths. Victoria, Australia, with a population very close to our own, breath-tested one in four and its alcohol related fatalities were 62. The same population, less than half the deaths.

If fines were calibrated to the cost of enforcement, we could afford a dedicated national force within The Force at no extra cost to the taxpayer. Indeed, if sponsored by the drinks industry, which has so repeatedly indicated its support for moderation and individual responsibility, it could make a profit for the State. More importantly, it would support what Micheal Martin is trying to do about the wider epidemic of binge-drinking, alco-pop consumption and near-national assumption that nobody can have fun unless they're pulverised with drink. It would radically change the pattern of admission to A&Es and, as a consequence, the economics of healthcare in this country.

It's obviously the right thing to do. So why is no party within Dáil Éireann campaigning to do it? Because politicians are trained by media opinion polls to rate their performance by how popular it makes them, not by the intrinsic rightness of an action. Political popularity in Ireland means not moving in any way to restrict our freedom to misuse alcohol.

One politician put it beautifully, last week, when he described unpopularity as 'sometimes the price of leadership and the cost of conviction.'

Such a pity it was Tony Blair. Talking about war.