The news is on in the background.

The first three items were the death of a pope, the arresting of a bloke for murder and the latest statistics on road deaths.

Does anyone notice a common thread?

I don’t know why they are so obsessed with death. Maybe because there is naturally a lot of it about? I predict that in the next hundred years, around seven billion people are going to die. That should be enough to keep the news hounds busy and happy?

So they glossed over the pope’s death because he isn’t a pope and all that there is to say has more or less been said.

They glossed over the murder in Cork because this is practically a daily event here. Every day they seem to find a new body “in suspicious circumstances”.

They got their teeth into the road deaths though. They had some bod on from the Road Safety Authority moaning about the fact that more people were killed on the roads in ’22 compared to ’21. The fact that most of ’21 seemed to be a constant series of lockdowns and a corresponding lack of traffic means that the increase sounds very dramatic. They love a drama and you could hear them straining at the leash.

The bod was very concerned about the number of pedestrians who were killed. Seeing as driving at speeds on a footpath is not a common sport here I would imagine that those pedestrians were either wearing dark clothing on a country road at night, or were daft enough to cross the road when the road wasn’t clear. In either case I would tend to look at the pedestrians to look after their own safety, but of course the motorist is to blame as always.

She trotted out the old adage. You know the one? A car hitting a pedestrian at 60 Kph will result in a 90% chance of death, but a car traveling at 30Kph will result in a 90% chance of survival. So the RSA want the gubmint to reassess speed limits to force us all to drive slower, preferably at a snail’s pace A car traveling at 3 Kph will probably result in 100% survival rate so I can see a return to the man with the red flag at some stage in the future.

They are also concerned at an apparent disregard for speed limits. Does it occur to them that it may be the limit that’s at fault here? A 50 Kph limit on a straight country road with no housing is a pretty stupid limit but there there are hundreds [if not thousands] of examples of this around the country. I would guess that the vast majority of speed infringements were purely because of the limit and not because the driver was driving recklessly. I would also suggest that reducing limits even further will cause a corresponding increase in ignoring those limits.

I would finally suggest that they really need a new NGO – The Pedestrian Safety Authority. – to nag pedestrians and not motorists.