Irish Examiner view: RSA advert is a tone-deaf response to crisis
The Road Safety Authority's latest advertising campaign has been criticised for suggesting that those who lose their driving licences become a ‘burden’ to their friends and family.
The carnage on our roads continues unabated. A man was killed in a crash in Dublin on Saturday morning, the following morning a man died in a crash in Kerry, and yesterday another man died in a crash in Kildare. Three deaths in three days.
Taoiseach Simon Harris opened a new bypass near Listowel in Kerry this week and addressed road safety by putting the onus on drivers, saying: “The single biggest action anybody can take is the individual behaviour of a motorist behind the wheel. There is nothing that the Government can do that will trump the individual benefits of the actions that each and every motorist can take.”
Laudable sentiments, but are they any more than an acknowledgement of the seriousness of the situation? Self-regulation has little to recommend it in any sector, and the mounting death toll on our roads suggests we are dealing with a sector in crisis.
The data backs this assertion up. Earlier this year, the European Commission published a report on road safety comparing deaths in 2023 against an average derived from three years before the pandemic. Ireland’s total road deaths per million inhabitants has seen the biggest increase in percentage terms of any European country, up 29%. Only one other country saw a double-digit percentage increase — Norway, where a 14% jump was half the size of Ireland’s increase.
In that context, it must be stated that the latest advertisement from the Road Safety Authority has not helped matters. It has been widely criticised for suggesting that those who lose their driving licences become a ‘burden’ to friends and family members who must drive them.
It is certainly a curious way to frame the results of someone being caught driving under the influence of drink or drugs, as there are far more serious consequences to such actions than catching lifts.
The best that can be said is that the advertisement embodies a haphazard response from State agencies to a crisis which has killed a staggering total of 123 people this year so far.
That response must improve across all agencies.
The rise of far-right activism has brought with it a rising tide of racial hatred, toxic nationalism, and a stew of misrepresentation and misreadings which is being used to stoke division and fear in Ireland.
There has been a creeping normalisation of actions which would once have been considered far beyond the pale, such as intimidating politicians and their families at their homes.
Other actions, such as the use of swastikas and praise for Hitler, are overt references to the “national socialism” of Germany in the 1930s and would also have been deemed inconceivable in Irish society just a few years ago.
The old Godwin’s Law on online discussions always held that the longer such debates went on the higher the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Hitler.
Invoking the Nazis as an example appears to be a first step for the far right, not an eventual comparison.
However, those espousing Nazi ideals and symbols manage to justify that embrace.
They are revealing a deep ignorance of the truth behind those signs and slogans. They would do well to consider a news story this week from northern Germany.
The Federal Court of Justice there upheld the conviction of 99-year-old Irmgard Furchner, who received a two-year suspended sentence in December 2022 by a state court. Furchner was convicted of being an accessory to over 10,500 murders while a secretary to the SS commander of the Nazis’ Stutthof concentration camp during the Second World War.
Those people were killed by poison gas, by horrific living conditions in the camp, by transportation to the Auschwitz death camp, and by being sent on death marches at the end of the war.
That is the reality behind the Irish far right’s reverence for the Nazi ideals: The deaths of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.
Is that an exaggeration? Hardly. It is the comparison invited by people glorifying those ideals, along with being the reality which lies behind that comparison.
It is the season for large-scale political conventions in the US, and the Democratic Party is meeting in Chicago to rubber-stamp Kamala Harris’s candidacy for president.
One of the speakers earlier this week was the incumbent, Joe Biden, who gave a stirring speech that contrasted sharply with his poor showing in the televised debate which ultimately torpedoed his bid for re-election.
Saying a week is a long time in politics is one of the laziest cliches imaginable — identifying how lazy it is can be seen as a cliche in itself — but just four weeks ago, Biden was the Democratic nominee for president. On Monday night, he was relegated to speaking at the opening night of the convention, not a prime time slot by any stretch of the imagination: Yesterday’s man just one month later.
Whether the Democrats are better off with Harris remains to be seen, though her campaign certainly appears more politically savvy than the Republicans’ efforts. How else to explain Donald Trump’s pick for vice-president, JD Vance, insulting Irish emigrants at a police event in Milwaukee last week?
‘Don’t insult Irish-Americans’ would certainly give ‘a week is a long time in politics’ a run for its money as a foundational cliche in US elections.
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