Within hours of the bus crash in Navan last Monday we had proved, yet again, that we are a nation which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. If a crisis doesn’t come with a price tag that can be analysed and compared to, say, the Government’s expenditure on Farmleigh House, then we don’t want to know.
So we learnt very quickly that the cost of installing seat belts on all our school buses would be less than the tens of millions recklessly squandered on the electronic voting scandal. It is easy to make a connection between computerised polling booths and inadequate school transport when all you see is the bottom line. When faced with a calamity that ought to make us reassess our own attitudes, our knee-jerk reaction is to focus instead on our legislators’ perceived priorities, measured entirely on the basis of cost. If school bus seat belts cost roughly the same as electronic polling machines then it was obviously a straightforward choice between them, and Martin Cullen’s ego won out.
Except it doesn’t work like that. Cullen would still have found the money for his electronic folly even if our school buses had seat belts. And had he, in fact, been thwarted in his efforts to waste a huge chunk of our tax revenue on a bid to make a name for himself, it still doesn’t mean he’d have redirected that €50m towards improving the school bus fleet. Because there wasn’t just an absence of a political will to make our children’s school transport safer. There was no huge public clamour for it, either. Almost 160,000 children have been travelling for years sitting three to a double seat on school buses without safety restraints, in old buses that are flashed and hooted at and dangerously overtaken on country roads by impatient motorists, and there were no ultimatums, no pickets on the Dail, no threats of boycotts. So throwing lots of money at the situation now won’t alter the fact that we really don’t care about road fatalities and have absolutely no intention of making the changes to our behaviour and lifestyles that might actually reduce our annual road death statistics. But doing the math, measuring the figures and reducing it to a simple financial equation conveniently absolves us all.
It is indeed tragic when a single accident claims five young lives, but the loss to their families would have been no less acute had they died separately in a spate of collisions over an average bank holiday weekend. And before this bank holiday weekend is over there will be other parents burying other young people whose lives held no less promise. On average, one person under the age of 25 is killed on our roads every two days, there’s a road accident every 19 minutes and one fatality every 21 hours. If disease or terrorism was claiming lives so regularly or randomly, we’d certainly modify our activities to try to keep ourselves safe. When the cause of a death is reckless, inconsiderate or just plain stupid human behaviour, we are unwilling to challenge our behaviour. We are prepared to live with an acceptable level of carnage on the roads for the sake of our own convenience.
The cause of the Navan crash will take some time to determine. And, while it is likely that seatbelts could have saved some lives, it is equally likely that some children thrown to safety from the bus would have been trapped and killed had they been belted in. It will never be possible to say for certain how an alternative scenario would have played out. There’s no doubt that the safety features on modern vehicles have been responsible for saving thousands of lives over the years. Back in 1977, when there were less than 750,000 cars in the country, and compulsory seat belts and air bags and side-impact protection systems were well in the future, almost 500 people were killed on Irish roads. In 2003, when there were almost 2m cars in the country, just 336 people were killed. Our car ownership is actually low by European levels, but car usage is higher than average, so the fall in road deaths might be due to the fact that there are fewer bicycles and pedestrians on the road these days.
Despite the fact that we have fewer cars per head of population than our nearest neighbour, our road fatality rate is almost twice that of Britain. And the root of the problem seems to be that we have come to view the speed and convenience of motor vehicles as less of a privilege and a benefit than an absolute right. We all reckon we own the road and so, unlike the Americans and continental Europeans, we have no enthusiasm for regulations. In France, for instance, slow-moving vehicles are obliged to pull over once more than seven cars are backed up behind them. Here, tractor and bin lorry drivers seem to take a grim pleasure in delaying as many people for as long as possible, which only encourages impatient motorists to make risky overtaking manoeuvres. In America, it is against the law to pass a schoolbus, from either side, when it pulls in to drop passengers. That regulation wouldn’t have spared the schoolgirls in Navan, but it would save several children’s lives every year at absolutely no cost. But given that school lollipop personnel report daily threats by motorists furious at the briefest delays, there is little chance of that simple measure coming into force here.
There was a fashion, a few years back, for those “baby on board” stickers on car windscreens. It waned pretty quickly, though, when it began to appear that the notices were as much of a counter-productive irritant to other motorists as L-plates. You were, after all, advertising the fact that you were just a learner, just a mother, and so your business couldn’t possibly be as urgent or important as that of the motorists you were delaying. And how dare you demand tolerance or consideration on somebody else’s time just because you have a child in your car? That same indignation tends to inform our attitude to school buses, too, for all the handwringing of the past week. We will loudly demand that the Government spend lots of money making them safer, just so long as they don’t expect us to behave with any more courtesy and patience when we pass those buses on the road.
If the safety of school transport can be fully secured at a cost of €50m worth of seatbelts, our sole duty is to grumble about the misuse of public funds — not to behave with restraint and respect around vehicles carrying children. So the safety of youngsters going to and from school may well be worth €50m of public funds, but not half a minute of your rush-hour time.
