The Kettle's Boyled: Too many people are dying on Irish roads

A motorcyclist died during a road race in North County Dublin on the first Sunday of July. The ‘Skerries 100’ is a prestigious motorcycling competition that has attracted some of the sport’s biggest names. Joey Dunlop is probably the best known, he won the event a staggering 27 times. Dunlop lost his life in Estonia during a road race there in 2000.

The news of the July fatality, following the death of another rider at the Tandragee 100 in Armagh a week earlier, brought a predictable clamour for the banning of these road racing events, and indeed it is hard to argue with the logic behind these concerns. If riders want to race motorcycles, it is unarguable that they stand a better chance of drawing their pensions if they do that on a track. They might suffer the indignity of sliding across a gravel area like an upturned turtle, but they’ll usually be able to limp away afterwards. Padding solid objects like trees, walls and lamp posts with bales of hay might make them look safer, but if you hit a bale-wrapped tree at 100 miles an hour you will find the human body wasn’t made for high-speed impact with solid objects.

For about a week after the tragedies at Tandragee and Skerries there were a lot of calls to ban these events, as well as counter claims that riders are doing what they love and should be allowed to continue doing it. But nobody seemed to look up and see the bigger picture.

In the week after the two deaths I mentioned, while everybody was calling for a ban on road racing, four other people lost their lives on Irish roads as a result of separate accidents in Cork, Galway, and Cavan. In Cavan, a teenage girl was killed in a collision involving a tractor, and a pedestrian in his 80s was killed near Castlebellingham. A young man in his 20s died after a single-vehicle collision on the N63 near Newbridge in Galway, and a woman in her 50s died following a collision between a car and a lorry in Cork.

On the week of the road race, seven other people died on Irish roads. On the previous week, three people died. On each of the three weeks before that, two people died, and in the week preceding that, there were five deaths. This year so far, there were 111 deaths on Irish roads.

We get excised about road racers, but we never seem to care about the others, or the reasons why they die. Maybe it’s not a few road racers that are the problem?