Now just battered bouquets remain to remind us

Date Published: {J}

It is not that people are callous, or unthinking. Life today is preoccupied. That is the word. It moves on quickly. That is especially so in the case of media driven by an ever-quickening agenda that must go on inexorably to whatever happens next.

Two weeks ago, we all associated with the pictures in the mind’s eye of a group young girls returning from a shopping trip, full of life, possibly discussing when they might wear ‘that new top’, when an accident on a dangerous stretch of road in dreadful rain, ended it all.

Vivacious, vital young lives were lost on that stretch of road between Milltown and Ballindine. But then, the rain and floods became the topic . . . now the only palpable personal reminders of the tragedy for so many people, are the bouquets of flowers tied to road signs at the point where the awful event occurred.

The flowers were beaten flat by mud and rain from passing traffic as I drove by at the weekend.There are other less direct reminders. Four new flashing, digital traffic signs have gone up on that killer stretch warning of bends, and that drivers should slow down.

It makes you wonder whether, if we did not have the money to do something about improving the road, we might have been at least a little more imaginative in the measures we took to warn drivers of the dangers of this narrow, winding stretch.

None was better than the signage invented by the amateurs some years ago – a group of local residents living on the Galway side of Aughrim who ran into a terrible series of fatal accidents, and decided to erect white crosses on the roadside . . . one for every person who had been killed in the previous years.

In the days after the recent awful accident which robbed families of their brightest and best, one of the aspects of the road which was surely overlooked, was the whole issue of signposting, how it might be improved and how we might use more imagination to make our roads safer.

This is by no means a comment on the specific accident and it would be important to make that clear. We do not know why this crash happened – but it is at least a possibility that the very crooked and twisty road, and absolutely dreadful driving conditions, certainly would have played their part.

One of the points which was made by a councillor interviewed at a very early stages in the hours after the collision, was that the road had not been improved, but that the authorities had made an attempt to make some impression on a dangerous stretch, by erecting signs warning of the dangers. These signs largely consisted of bright yellow reminders of bad bends and the need to control speed.

If there are a few ‘rogue stretches’ left on the roads in this county, then this is one of them – once a driver leaves Milltown at one end, or Ballindine at the other, what are essentially relatively modern driving conditions as regards the width of the carriageway, and some attempt to eliminate twists and turns, are simply to be forgotten.

These few miles are like as if one decided to turn the clock back to the years when a road was barely the width of two cars, where the line of the road followed whatever ‘sheeptrack’ was the original course adopted by the road, and where the slightest lapse in concentration, or fraction of speed too much, leaves you stamping on the brakes in an effort to avoid oncoming traffic.

The residents of that area near Aughrim had precisely the same dilemma a few years ago – miles of twists and bends, a narrow road, a history of both serious and minor accidents, and no hope of money being spent in sufficient quantity to get rid of the danger. Their solution was that stretch of white crosses along the grass margins.

Like mute mourners and sentinels, these crosses appeared almost overnight. They had an immediate effect. I remember driving through the stretch and reporting for an RTÉ radio evening drivetime programme, Today at Five, on the experience.

‘Eerie’ was the word that sprang to mind as one drove down that alleyway of white crosses, each one of them marking an individual who had died on that stretch over a period of years. Some had a tiny piece of black crepe added to increase the effect.

It had the same extraordinary impact on hundreds of other motorists. Driving through a ‘graveyard’, one was unlikely to exceed the 50mph speed limit which then prevailed on the stretch, but which had been largely ignored and certainly was rarely enforced. In contrast, the ‘speed’ limit during the weeks those crosses were there, was very much observed.

The crosses were devastatingly effective but, of course, the reaction of what one might term ‘official Ireland’ was anything but favourable. The usual nonsense began – were they erected with planning permission, would they not be a distraction to drivers, one had to consider the design and siting of such signs with great care, and so on.

One of the objections about ‘a distraction’ came at the same time that a national body was putting up signs saying a particular number had been killed, while this number was ‘corrected’ on the same sign! A distraction?

Proving that a bit of commonsense can be very effective indeed, the crosses succeeded in slowing down all the drivers on a particular stretch, the accident rate plummeted in the area, and ‘official Ireland’ eventually capitulated and very large special road safety signs were erected on the stretch.

I drove past the spot between Milltown and Ballindine at the weekend. Those flowers acted as a powerful mute reminder of four young lives lost when they were at the very threshold of blossoming into their twenties.

I remembered those crosses at Aughrim and thought of Oscar Wilde’s line . . . “and dawn crept down the street like a frigthtened child”.