Dodging dodgy drivers

Sir — I remember the summer of 1966 like it was yesterday. With my friends Michael and Paraic, we were counting the days until Perks Funfair came to Ballyhaunis at the summer’s end, just before we went back to national school.

We would eagerly spend all our pocket money driving around in the bumper cars as we called them then. (We learned in later life that these wonderful cars were called dodgems.)

We had devised a plan to drive at each other and at last minute to swerve and dodge each other while spinning around, each in our individual cars. We would have watched the cars going around the enclosure earlier and picked what we thought were the quickest.

So in that summer long ago we learned to ‘dodge’. Fast forward to the present. I am still in Ireland and driving on our roads since 1972 while my two pals drive on another side of the road, living as they do in the USA.

Irish road rules tell us to always yield to traffic approaching from the right. But over the past year or so, I have experienced this basic direction is more obeyed in the breach rather than the rule.

Many drivers are no longer yielding at roundabouts, entering motorways from slip roads or not bothering to stop for pedestrians on crossings.

I have given up flashing lights or sounding horn to offenders who drive on to my path on roundabouts/ motorways.

Recently a driver reacted by immediately giving me his middle finger, but he lost control and mounted the side of the roundabout. He had been talking on a mobile phone which fell from his hand. A collision narrowly avoided but he kept searching on the car floor as he drove away. I could cite many more personal examples, but the conundrum remains for many of the motoring public: ‘To yield or not to yield, that is the question’. I suggest that using the Walkinstown roundabout should be mandatory for all offenders. I used it first in the 1970s and it’s still a challenge. Maybe the only answer is automated cars as some bad habits never change. The lessons learned in Ballyhaunis in the summer of ’66 have probably saved me from collisions and/or injury too many times to mention. Walter Kilcullen, Dunboyne, Co Meath