A single slow day won’t steer doughnut drivers to road safety

And yet there was no shortage of gardai to strike fear into the citizenry on Friday. For 24 hours, gardai blitzed the country’s road death blackspots with patrols and speed cameras — having helpfully flagged their locations online well in advance. So unless any of these burglary gangs were dumb enough to speed past a well-advertised garda speed check as they set off to ransack more rural homes on Friday, they could go about their business with even greater impunity than usual.

For all of 24 hours, Operation Slow Down probably does reduce the risk of road deaths. But any suggestion that it has a lasting effect on road behaviour is nonsense. People slow down when they see a garda car, and speed up when it is out of sight. After a promising start, we are now on course to see a record rise in road deaths this year — after 20 deaths in July alone, we may see 200 lives lost in road accidents in 2015. You can put that down to the same garda cutbacks that may have cost John O’Donoghue his life, but no amount of patrols will stop those people who seem hell-bent on killing themselves when they get behind a wheel, and at some point we have got to question the wisdom of even trying.

Our roads are safer than ever before, our cars are safer, our drink driving regulations are tougher, and nobody gets into a car without knowing the basic precautions. And yet one in three people killed on Irish roads was not wearing a seat belt. Nobody can have missed those “speed kills” ad campaigns and road signs, yet motorists who observe the speed limit on any Irish motorway are easily outnumbered by those zipping past. If a burglar manages to avoid gardai, he may end up with few extra quid. If a drunk, speeding, dangerous driver escapes detection, he may end up dead.

It may be time to take a hard look at the nature of our increasing road deaths, and to consider the possibility that lots of these fatal accidents are not accidents at all, and therefore not preventable by more policing or greater care. For example, there is scarcely a stretch of Irish road unmarked by “doughnuts” — circles of tyre rubber burnt into the road by young drivers doing stunts at night — and many late night crashes involving young men are almost certainly due to “doughnuts” gone wrong.

According to US statistics, a teenage male driver’s chances of dying in a road accident increase by 44% if he is carrying a single passenger his own age — add two more lads under 21, and his chances of killing himself rocket. And consider the one in three who die without seatbelts: since most modern cars sound an alarm when the belt is unfastened, ignoring that warning is a conscious choice.

How many late-night, single-vehicle road deaths are really suicides? How many deaths are not the consequences of chance misfortune or inattention, but the results of deliberate decisions to take risks when the coast is clear? And how is extra policing, for a 24-hour stretch once a year, ever going to prevent them?

You’re turning into a monster, dear

Staring into somebody’s eyes for 10 minutes has the same effect as taking a hallucinogenic drug.

An Italian psychologist got 10 couples to stare silently at one another and found that 90% — or 18 people, since the study was so small — reported seeing the other person’s face becoming deformed. Three-quarters said their partner’s face turned into a monster and half saw their own faces superimposed on the other person.

You’ve got to wonder what inspires this kind of research but, on the plus side, it’s an experiment you can try at home.

However, if you feel obliged to report that your partner looks like a deformed monster after a few minutes’ close scrutiny, we can’t vouch for its safety.

Funeral row has biblical outcome

One of the stages of grieving that few people expect, but that few escape, is the Family Row. Lots of authors have recorded the phenomenon but rarely is it played out so excruciatingly and so publicly as it was at the High Court in Belfast last week.

The separated parents of a young man who died suddenly two weeks ago disagreed on whether to cremate or bury his body. The case went to court and, with both sides having equal claim to the body, the judge’s predicament was truly biblical in its discomfort.

Fortunately, the bereaved mother withdrew her case for her son’s burial, saving the family more needless grief. The father pressed ahead with his plans for cremation, despite cries of “shame” from his daughter in the courtroom, and the body was due to be cremated yesterday morning.

If ever a case required the wisdom of Solomon, this was it and, rather grotesquely, the outcome was precisely that threatened by the Old Testament judge: both parents are to get half their son’s ashes apiece.

A woman wrote a letter of complaint after she came out of the lavatory cubicle in a Dublin medical institution and saw a male plumber fixing a tap. The plumber, Edward Kelly, had called out a warning but thought the coast was clear. The woman spoke of her “horror” and said she felt “belittled”, and Kelly, a plumber for 43 years, was duly sacked.

Luckily, an Employment Appeals Tribunal awarded him damages for unfair dismissal last week, but he really should think about suing that woman as well. Most people manage to share bathrooms, in their homes and even in some restaurants, without feeling horrified or belittled. Shame on his employers, too — the tyranny of the readily offended has to be resisted with common sense.