A firm purpose of amendment for this ÔmobileÕ using driver

Date Published: {J}

I suppose I had better ‘come clean’ about the issue of using the mobile phone while driving – before going on to preach about not using the mobile, and just in case some eagle-eyed reader out there spotted me and sends a sarky letter.

By the way, it didn’t take that advertisement on radio with the two voices speaking at once, to convince me. I really do believe that it is hard to concentrate on two things at the one time when you are driving . . . but every day I see literally hundreds trying to do it.

I have to admit that I was as guilty as the next one, but now I have a firm purpose of amendment. Betimes, I have been among those juggling the mobile while driving and at the same time trying to keep a ‘weather eye’ out for any cop car that may be in the vicinity. That was before I changed my ways recently and decided to become law-abiding.

Funny thing is that I never thought the day would dawn when I would be utterly wedded to my mobile phone. I never thought that if I forgot to bring my mobile, I would slavishly turn about on the road and go back to the house to collect the damned thing, or I would be a bag of unease if the battery was particularly low as I set off.

Whatever happened to the free spirit who was prepared to say – ‘they can always get in touch with me when I have arrived where I’m going’. Even more appropriately, whatever happened to the newsman who, for years, waited for the postman to arrive with handwritten missives from all over the West . . . as distinct from the man who now persistently runs the ‘get mail’ function on my laptop.

I was even one of those ‘originals’ who, just a few years ago, considered that I might be the last of the ‘hold outs’ in the world, and never even possess a mobile.

I told myself that certainly, if I did own a mobile, I would never be among those who would have it switched-on while driving the car, or even at Mass. Maybe it was easier to be anti-mobile when the average mobile weighed a few pounds, cost a fortune and ‘everyone’ didn’t have one.

Indeed there were times in the recent past when I was just as bad as all the rest of those idiots you see with the head ‘glued to the shoulder’ and the phone jammed in position as they do acrobatics attempting to go around roundabouts, or pull into parking spaces.

Making the case against myself and all the other drivers involved, I have to say that, in my opinion, the reason the law on use of mobiles while driving doesn’t work, is simply that the law is not enforced with a sufficient level of vigour and the penalties are not stiff enough.

On a cursory examination, the thought of 90,000 penalty points issued over a number of years, would appear to ‘give the lie’ to that point of mine about enforcement . . . but have you ever stood at a major junction in this town and watched the cars go by?

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.