Learner’s guide to why bad laws end up being ignored

AQUALIFIED driver is not a qualified driving instructor. If I could convey just one thought this morning, that you might take with you through the day, it is this: a qualified driver is not a qualified driving instructor.

I mean, there’s nothing very clever about it, when you put it like that. Indeed it is so obvious you’d think that it hardly needs stating at all, and yet in the various debates about the 337 vehicles seized since the end of December due to their learner drivers being “unaccompanied”, I have not heard this mentioned at all.

I have heard Michael Healy-Rae pointing out various iniquities and anomalies which are mainly to do with the fact that this “crackdown” discriminates against people such as his constituents, and that the unaccompanied L-plater is often not doing it as a matter of “culture”, but of “bare, basic necessity”.

But I would still want him to challenge the premise that having a qualified driver sitting beside the learner is inherently good.

Because the qualified driver, as we have observed, is not a qualified driving instructor. And since qualifications go to the very essence of this thing, it is no small thing that the person sitting in the passenger seat has no official credentials in terms of assisting the driver, other than perhaps to point out that he might prefer to listen to Marty Whelan on the radio, rather than Morning Ireland. Yes, he might be qualified to do that, but otherwise in some cases the accompanist, as such, will actually be a worse driver than the learner — it may be some poor ould fella who got the Sylvester Barrett amnesty and is being dragged along as a cosmetic exercise, because of two words which now haunt his poor ould head: “Shane Ross”.

Or it may be one of the thousands of competent qualified divers who freely admit that they would have no chance of passing the driving test, forced to sit beside a son or a daughter who is clearly a better driver than they are, but who narrowly failed the last test and who has been waiting for 19 weeks for another one — indeed the son or daughter might drily observe that the majority of accidents are still caused by qualified drivers, and nobody mentions that either.

But while these objections are largely unspoken, they are felt deeply to the extent that the laws on unaccompanied learner drivers have always been widely ignored and unenforced, as bad laws tend to be. There is this falseness at the heart of them, which actually erodes the confidence of the people in the seriousness of the road safety authorities.

And that’s dangerous.