I’m posting this on New Year’s Eve. Here’s a prediction about the weekend:

The AA or the Gardai will have issued a “Call” for drivers to “exercise caution” over the weekend.

By Monday night, a number of young men will be dead. The following pattern will then occur:

1. A shocking accident will have occurred, killing a number of young men. We will enter a three day media cycle.

Day one: Lurid images of the crash site and twisted torn remnants of vehicles, with reports from RTE correspondents ending with the phrase: “…as another community struggles to come to terms with its loss”.

Day two: Interviews with local people, shaking their heads in disbelief and shock. The local parish priest or councillor will mention feeling numb, and that every family has been touched by this. Again a mention of the community struggling.

Day three: The young men will be buried as RTE look on solemnly.

End of process. Will the media go back to actually find out who was to blame? Will we ever learn, with the same media intensity, of the outcome of the coroner’s reports that SOME of these drivers were drunk or on drugs or driving recklessly with little regard for their safety or more importantly, the safety of others? That some of them through their actions killed other innocent people?

No. Because in Ireland, there is a monster going around rural Ireland killing young men, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Every single person who dies in a “road tragedy” is completely innocent of any wrongdoing, whether they were driving home safely, stone cold sober, or whether they were the drunken reckless bastard who plowed into the stone cold driver. EVERYONE is innocent, and if you say otherwise you are a bastard. It’s the monster’s fault, and if we had a government that cared about us, it would do something about it.