"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect". Mark Twain 1904
// October 31st, 2007 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
And though I may disagree with you about many, many things I will defend your right to be a member with my life even if you might not do the same because though you may doubt it within you I will live again.
All Gods love us equally, and in their eyes we are all their greatest fear.
We will never die, never grow old and never have a secret never to be told.
// October 26th, 2007 // 4 Comments » // Uncategorized
The last 48 hours have seen an unprecedented level of political outrage pouring out in the main from folks under 30 in Ireland, why?
Because the government announced it was going to enforce the law fully with regard to those on provisional licenses and also change the anomaly with regard to those on 2nd provisional license. Not a bad idea one would think except the same government has spent years turning a blind eye to the underlying problem with Irish driving behaviour and who is responsible for driver behaviour, well I would guess that would be drivers. The odd thing is this should not be in any way a party political issue in that there is no aspect of ideology unless we allow for the purist of the pure libertarians who would reckon that all and any regulation is wrong.
Should these people be unaccompanied on the roads? Of course not, but when you ask why are they on the road, ah well that is a question that no one wagging their figures about the problem appears interested in addressing. Those with licenses will tell you it is because they are lazy or stupid. Most people do not pass the test the first time, yet all those with licenses appear to acquire a common degree of self satisfaction that they have passed the test. Passing the test does not mean you are a good driver, you are merely competent. The truth is that too large a number of those with full licenses are bad drivers and at the heart of what the RSA is proposing to do is to change things so that people will no longer pass the test and somehow still be bad drivers with bad habits. In effect they are abandoning all hope of reaching the existing full license community and that is just plain wrong.
Why is it so bad? Well, we’ve got a cultural problem obeying the law when we think it isn’t sensible. The fact is that in Ireland we have a poor standard of driving across the board. It has been poor for decades and by and large nothing by anyone has been done about it. Let us look at some of the reality of a moment or two: there is a tranche of people (something like over 200,000) from the mid 80s who got full licenses because they had been on the waiting list for a test for so long that they were on a third provisional, so the solution was to give them all full licenses not as a temporary measure but for good. They’ve never passed a test but all have full licenses; that is almost half the number of people on provisional but we don’t hear any calls for them to be made pass the test. Why well most of them would be in their late 40s, and according to some the fact that they have been driving for years now means they must be reasonable good, which is the sort of logic that leads some to believe that because they have been on provisional licenses for years that they shouldn’t need to do a test. Throw in those from about twenty years prior to that who never had to do a test because they simply had to but the license and we’ve got a number nearly as large as the number of provisional licenses driving around unaccompanied never having passed the test.
Those on provisional licenses make up 25% of all those on the roads but account for much less than that in roads deaths. Of course this is because not all of the 420,000 are on the road at all. And why are there 420,000 people with provisional licenses? Again let us be sensible about that figure of 420,000 provisional licenses many of them are held by people who are not driving at all, it could 50,000 it could be 100,000, who knows not the RSA. These people may have got them so they could learn to drive but found they didn’t have time or the finances to afford driving lessons so they do not use them, but once you get one the clock is ticking.
The test does not make you a better driver it simply states that on a given day that you were sufficiently competent. No one is magically a better driver the day after the test than they were the day before, the really sad fact is that most are never again as good a driver as they were that day. If the problem we are addressing is evidently with the vast bulk those involved in accidents namely full licenser holders then the idea might have been to retest them all when they renew their licenses. Of course we couldn’t do that because the testing system is clogged to choking already.
The fact is that the majority of fully licensed drivers in Ireland never took much in the way of formal lessons. Everyone acknowledges that the system is flawed and is consistently producing bad drivers but instead of dealing with the problem of poor driver behaviour the RSA has ignored doing something that might cost money like ensuring proper standards in the instruction and tester of drivers. Learning to drive should be a serious business and lessons should be comprehensive. Another aspect that we need to look at is our attitude to when in your life you learn to drive, we allow for people to start while still children so we suggest that driving is something a child can do when it should be obvious to us all that while control of a car might be straightforward enough for a child that the decision and risk assessment isn’t. And driving lessons aren’t something you should be treating like some of us treat confession something you do every once in a while when your mother gets on your back about it. You can’t take a 2 hour lesson and then another set of lessons 2 months later. Also one hour lessons are a waste of time especially in built up places like Dublin as you spend 15 minutes driving the previous person home and the 15 minutes driving to the next person’s place, not much time to get to one of the areas that schools use as practices areas (and why have we never thought to allocate some land to driving ranges in the sense of places that people learn the basics of moving a car about off the road system). The state has a view of who is learning to drive which appears to suggest they think the typical learner driver is on working and living at home with their parents with access to a car for lessons and a support network of friends and relations who can help out, the reality is probably more likely that the typical learner is just after starting work, living away from home and with friends living spread all over the city and not in a position to assist in the learning process. Throw in a 3 hour commute per day on public transport and I’m not clear where they will find the time to take lessons with sufficient frequency to get the confidence to drive.
The aims of the RSA report are laudable and we should be intending to achieve them, but you don’t start by demanding that people take lessons without first making sure that lessons of a sufficiently quality are available. You don’t demand that people take a test that isn’t available to them or the quality of which is questionable. Surely it is part of the remit of the RSA to find out why we have such problems what the consequence are and how do we deal with the problems in order alleviate the problems.
And how is it that we can’t cope with the numbers of people looking to take the test after all it is a roughly predictable number. Taking a rough figure from the leaving cert we probably have somewhere in the region of 70,000 people coming onto the driving scene each year. A test takes about 45 minutes which means each tester can get through 10 or so tests per day on average so 50 per week that means 20 testers would do a thousand per week, which is 52,000 and we have far more than 20 in the country. So why does the backlog exist? Because the state wasn’t bothered enough to tackle those involved in the testing process and then gave the same type of nod and wink to those on provisional licenses as Dempsey did yesterday that it wouldn’t matter if they drove. And some people think he is taking a lead on the issue?
// October 26th, 2007 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
This petitions ask that the implement of a crackdown on those driving on provisional licenses be postponed until such time as the problems in testing and training of drivers is sorted out.
http://www.petitiononline.com/moretime/petition.html
Update: I posted the petition on p.ie and then left it while I did some work and it has garnered over 600 signatures in just under 3 hours.
// October 22nd, 2007 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
A classic of the type and pretty much summed up the feeling of some at the time, major hat tip to Gabriela for finding it. That said feeling was muted by the offer price being 2.5 times the stock price at the time, and the frank that IBM turned out to be as much interested in becoming more like Lotus than simply buying the technology.
// October 20th, 2007 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized
I was at the SOS rally in Limerick this weekend and for all that it was interesting to see what people had to say for themselves and who turned up it was also interesting for those that couldn’t bring themselves to face the music. As expected the fearless defender of his political career Willie O’Dea stayed away but John Cregan (FF – Limerick West) tried to make the case for Fianna Fail and effectively took a bullet for the party by being booed off the stage. Oddly enough RTE appear to have chosen not to report the fact that Cregan was actually booed off the stage preferring to simply say the crowd was anger at times. Timmy Dooley TD (FF – Clare) on the other hand decided to sit it out in the crowd (I guess by doing so he can say he was at the event even though he wasn’t quite brave enough to face the music by taking the stand with Cregan), dressed casually as you can see in th picture below he can’t claim that he was perhaps intending to take the stand but was somehow delayed by traffic and found himself so late that he didn’t want to disturb those on the stand it. Even the very young in attendance thought the guff from Cregan about reporting back to the Sun-Taoiseach with our “concerns” a bit of fairytale for this hour of the day.
Curiously the local mayors who spoke weren’t referred to by their party membership in an effort to spare the blushes of the likes of Kevin Sheehan Cathaoirleachof Limerick County a FF stalwart. Sheehan in his speech managed to blame the people of Dublin, faceless bureaucrats and most bizarrely called for people to vote against the European Treaty referendum, I guess it’s one way to get people to vent before the local elections in 2009. we couldn’t have people holding the government responsible for running the country now could we? and he asked the Taoiseach great man that he is after bringing peace to the north to come to Limerick to broker talks to allow us all to live in harmony.
As the Claw noted at the end some local representatives “lacked the balls” to even show their face and and someone else stated that we have no need Saturday night fighters who come Monday morning are more Minnie mouse than Mighty Mouse.
// October 12th, 2007 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
I caught this on the beeb during the week part of their Why Democracy season and it shows up so many aspects of Democracy that it is scary.
I think it is one of the instance classic documentaries that come along every few years and is perhaps the best political program I’ve ever seen bar none!
Ok the West Wing is still class but this is just so brilliant.
// October 10th, 2007 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
I’ve been looking at the 2nd series of Heroes (don”t ask how, but I promise to watch it when it is on big telly if that’s ok with the advertisers).
It is proving interesting viewing but I have major bone to pick with the producers, if you’re going to have Irish characters it might an idea to source some Irish actors or at the very least people who can do an passable Irish accent. In this day and age I would have thought they might have been able to score an Irish actor or six to play the parts.
// October 3rd, 2007 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized
We are told that people are on waiting within an average of 2-5 months. Now you’d have to admit that is a pretty broad average even by the standards we tend to see in the health sector. A real average would be something like 3 months 17 days and not something that is more than 150% the size of the shortest time period involved.
We are also told that reducing staff numbers will have no impact on patient care, yet we are contrastingly regularly informed that increasing staff numbers is only undertaken if it will result in an improvement in patient care.
We are also told that of the 40,000 on waiting lists that 12,000 are waiting over 6 months.
We are told that 6,000 fail to turn up for their procedures and that this is entirely their own fault. Now, I’ve had personal experience of this circumstance of not being able to make an appointment as my father who is in his 70s was consistently only informed late on the day before that he was to be in Cork city at a hospital early the following morning for a procedure that he has to under go on a regular but not too frequent basis. Traveling to Cork for this procedure means a journey that he has to undertake by public transport, and public transport is something he can’t access at a sufficiently early hour to be in Cork for 10am. Cork can’t provide him with a bed overnight prior to the procedure and yet keeps scheduling the procedure for early in the morning. There is no political ideology at work here between public and private it is down to competence and work practices. It has been repeatedly pointed out to the people Why not schedule appointments for those closest to the hospital early in the day and those from further away for later on allowing them to travel there any back? It has been repeatedly raised with the folks on the front line who have we believe passed it on to the administration people yet it never seems to affect his appointment times.
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