Driven to drink

ast week Michael Fitzgerald, a Tipperary Fine Gael councillor said he saw nothing wrong with having three or four pints and driving home afterwards.

He was speaking on local radio about his own views and that of his rural constituents, presumably middle-aged and elderly men who regularly sip a few pints, have a chat or a game of cards and who then drive home, as they have done for years.
All hell broke loose! You would think he had just suggested it was OK to marry an eight year old or bring in mandatory euthanasia for pensioners. There were hysterical calls for the party leader Enda Kenny to expel him from the party. Joe Duffy’s Liveline radio show, among others, was besieged by outraged callers, who worked themselves into a frenzy demanding Fitzgerald’s head on a plate. The Irish Times ran with a sniffy editorial about the scourge of drink on all our lives, while condemning Fitzgerald’s views. It was a classic clash of civilisations, Irish style – of rural versus D4 thinking.
But why all the fuss? All the councillor was doing was stating what, in most cases, the law already allows. Drink-driving is not illegal. Driving over the limit is certainly illegal and the law is being strictly enforced right now – something few would disagree with. But, for good reason, virtually every country in the world allows for a certain amount of alcohol to be consumed while driving.
Our own alcohol limit was lowered a few years ago, bringing us into line with most other counties. But this doesn’t seem to satisfy some people. They want to harass and make pariahs of people who obey the law and who are trying to be responsible. I’ll say it again – it is not illegal to drink and drive.
How much you can legally drink before driving depends on the build (and gender) of the person concerned. For an average 170 pound man, analyses have shown that it would take four drinks in under an hour – on an empty stomach – to reach the legal limit. Drinking much more slowly, as most people do, on a full stomach and the same man could quite conceivably consume three, four, perhaps even five pints and remain well within the legal limits (and you can check these facts on any number of web-sites) But for the unfortunate councillor, merely agreeing out loud with what is already permitted was enough to have him hanged.
What is this obsession with alcohol when it comes to road safety? Certainly, excessive drinking plays a part in some, perhaps many accidents – but other equally serious factors are almost totally ignored. Driver fatigue was cited recently by the National Safety Council as a major cause of road deaths. But the law doesn’t care one iota about this. There are no ways of measuring tiredness, so it’s left up to the individual to make up their own mind whether or not they are too tired to drive. And “the country is awash with drugs” we’re constantly being told. Again, the law doesn’t appear remotely interested – and there are few if anyone clamouring for random road-side drug tests. According to my car manual, having incorrect tyre pressure “seriously affects braking power” – but I’ve never heard anyone calling for Gardaí to set up road blocks to measure tyre pressure.
And don’t get me started on the 400,000 or so provisional license holders who are allowed to drive illegally and unchallenged with the tacit consent of government, insurance companies and the Gardaí.

Statistics involving alcohol and road accidents are almost non-existent and appear to be based on hearsay rather than sound, scientifically collated evidence. If a huge percentage of the population drinks alcohol and drives cars, some will inevitably be involved in accidents – this doesn’t mean that alcohol was responsible for the accident. It may well have been – but cause and effect is usually not established.
The reasons are frequently much more complex. In New Zealand, for example, only 43% of those involved in alcohol-related accidents had a full licence – therefore you could argue quite compellingly that inexperience was just as likely to be the cause of the accident as alcohol. Looking at the headlines these past few weeks, where young males were primarily both the cause and the victims of road accidents, this would also appear to be the case in this country.
The National Safety Council – the body responsible for promoting safety on our roads – are not beyond pulling stunts aimed at demonising responsible drinkers. Earlier this year they published what can only be described as a bizarre survey. According to this “survey”, drink-driving (not “drunk” driving mind) came third behind drug dealing and child abuse when it came to “shameful” behaviour. What this means, of course, is that anyone who has even one drink, say a glass of wine with their lunch or a bottle of beer or two after work, and who drives home perfectly legally, is right up there with drug dealers and paedophiles.
Apart from the fact that the methodology of the survey was flawed, it is beyond comprehension to compare what is clearly criminal behaviour – i.e. drug dealing and child abuse – with what in most cases is perfectly legal. It makes you wonder what the current game is all about. But the results of the survey were broadcast widely without any challenge (incensed, I phoned the Safety Council at the time and asked for more details about this so-called survey and how it was conducted – my call was never returned.)
I look forward to more surveys like this from the NSC. It’s a proven fact, for example, that pedestrians hit by SUVs have far less chance of surviving than those hit by common or garden saloon cars. I don’t see any surveys citing SUV drivers as “shameful” people. On the contrary, sales of these monsters are rocketing and can be seen outside schools every morning. Shame, shame, shame!
The fact is that the State seems hell-bent on demonising responsible drivers, i.e. those who remain under the limit and who obey the law. I include myself among their number and I’m getting more than a tad fed up with it. In fact I’ve twice been harassed by the authorities in recent weeks for my troubles.
Let me explain. A couple of weeks ago, while driving home from the Ryan Adams gig at the Olympia, I was stopped at a Garda checkpoint on Nassau Street. It was a big, flashy uber-checkpoint, with Garda Jeeps parked on both sides of the road flashing blue lights, and Garda officers lining the road with their fluorescent overcoats. Every car was stopped, including mine.
I rolled down the window and a uniformed head looked in. Having enquired where I had been and where I was going, the Garda officer asked hopefully, “Any drink?” “Yes,” I told him. I’d had a glass of wine with my lasagne at home over five hours earlier and had a couple of beers before the gig, almost three hours before. The look on his face was almost as if I’d admitted murdering my entire family and I was on my way to bury the bodies. “Pull over and step out of the car,” he said, beckoning another officer over.
Now, I was 100 per cent certain that I was nowhere near the limit and I repeated what I’d had to drink, lest he had thought I’d drunk the whole bottle of wine earlier. “You’ve already told me that,” he snapped. “Now blow into this.”
He produced a gizmo that looked like a Sony Walkman with a white plastic tube sticking out of it. After I blew for all I was worth he squinted at the machine. “I’m going to have to ask you to do that again,” he said. I blew a second time but this still wasn’t good enough and I was asked to blow once more. I began to worry that some kind of cumulative effect would come into play – every breath you take etc. (A detective friend later told me that I should have refused to blow more than once, as the machine was clearly defective.) But after the final blow he looked at the machine and said something like, “That’s a pass”. Even when my “innocence” was proven there was no thanks or apology offered for wasting my time (and his) and he just walked away leaving me wondering what the hell that was all about.
Interestingly, all that week the Garda press office issued statements about how many people were “processed” for drink driving. Was I among those “processed”? Probably. Besides there was nothing “random” about my breath test. I was asked a question, I answered it honestly and the Garda officer clearly didn’t believe me.
I had been stopped a few weeks earlier at a checkpoint outside the Burlington Hotel. This time I had not had a drink and said so. But the Garda wasn’t happy with this and he shone a torch in my face. “Your eyes are a bit red,” he said. I was suffering from a cold and had been sneezing all the way home and I told him so. He still wasn’t happy until I produced a bottle of Optrex eye drops and he reluctantly accepted my explanation and said I was free to drive on. Gee thanks!

There seems to be a touch of Reefer Madness about the anti drink-driving campaign. (For those of you not familiar with Reefer Madness it was a public health film in the US in the 1930s that showed a man taking a few puffs of weed and instantly transforming into the worst kind of deranged monster imaginable. Rather than put people off the stuff, it made them laugh their heads off and became an instant classic on the college circuit.) Some anti-drink driving advertising is so over the top it’s plain daft – one in particular shows a car been driven quite slowly, hitting off a kerb and then dramatically somersaulting about 30 feet through the air before landing in a back garden on top of a child. I don’t remember any such accident ever occurring and there are hundreds more typical accidents that could be portrayed to make the ad far more effective. And then there’s the intoning of the line: “Never, ever, drink and drive.” Well, why not? It’s perfectly legal as long as you stay within the limit.
The drink driving campaign is what people think of as ‘sexy’: it allows for a kind of smug, superiority to prevail among those who would never dream of getting behind the wheel of a car with a drink on them. Kevin Myers once wrote, correctly in my opinion, that it is a convenient diversion for all, allowing the authorities to ignore the real causes of road deaths. “It’s not us normal drivers causing accidents, it’s those awful drunk drivers,” he wrote or words to that effect. “If we could only get rid of them, all would be fine.”
I’m not boasting about the fact that I (legally) drink, and drive responsibly – but I’m certainly not ashamed of it either. Like most people, I’m much more careful than I was in the past. But in 20 years of driving I’ve not had a single accident, nor a conviction of any kind (touch wood). Besides, I’m a better qualified driver than most in this country: I passed my test in the UK – a much tougher, more rigorous one than the Irish equivalent (which is laughably outdated, by the way). I will continue to enjoy a few drinks on a full stomach and will not yield to the kind of mob-driven hysteria that currently prevails. I believe I’m not alone in this.
It seems to me that the subject of drink driving brings out the worst in some people. Even Stevie Wonder, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century and one of my all time favourites lost it completely on his dire song ‘Don’t Drive Drunk’ – not only his worst ever composition but one of the worst songs ever committed to vinyl. To Councillor Fitzgerald I say, enjoy your few pints but for God’s sake stay within the limits – the grief just isn’t worth it... and I’m not talking about death!b