Diarmaid Ferriter: History shows there’s no room for ambiguity when it comes to drinking and driving

This newspaper noted in October 1969 that there was “surprisingly little public debate concerning the imminent introduction into this country of the use of an estimation of the level of alcohol in a drivers’ blood as a means of assessing his ability to drive a car”. The new initiative centred on the breathalyser and the blood and urine tests that would accompany it if necessary. If there was to be debate, it was also suggested, it would centre very much not “on matters of principle, but of technology” and the questions of accuracy and loopholes.From the vantage point of today, the 1969 rules seem astonishingly lax. Even at the time, it was noted that the permitted limit of “125 mg per 100ml of blood” was “a generously liberal one – perhaps equivalent to six small whiskies or four pints of beer taken by an eleven stone man over a period of two hours”. I’m not sure about the strict accuracy of that, but today we would call that binge drinking. And today the legal limits are 50mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood for fully licensed drivers and 20mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood for professional, learner and novice drivers.The new dawn in 1969 certainly did not inaugurate an era of vigilance; the then minister for health, Fianna Fáil’s Erskine Childers, remarked on the Irish determination to shove problem drinking “under the carpet”. In February 1972, Bobby Molloy, the minister for local government, whose department had responsibility for roads, wrote an unusually emotional letter to taoiseach Jack Lynch about road deaths. Molloy was alarmed that the “figures issued by the Gardaí for January show another shocking increase to 62 deaths – 22 more than in January 1971. It looks as if we must expect 700 road deaths this year and at least 25,000 people injured unless we can take some drastic action to prevent it ... Above all, there is frightening (though confidential) evidence of the level of alcohol in the bodies of accident victims, while drivers under the influence are a common sight after closing hours ... drunk driving and excessive speed should be eliminated or reduced to a tolerable level.” He finished by writing of the “despair which I feel. I even thought of asking for a day of national mourning for the 600 dead last year and making it an annual event.”The mourning days came in time, under a global umbrella, in the form of World Day for Remembrance of Road Traffic Victims, which – starting in 2005 – the United Nations asked governments to hold on the third Sunday of November each year. To mark that day in November 2015, the Road Safety Authority (RSA) noted that since the first recording of Irish road traffic victims in 1959, “23,752 people have been killed on roads in the Republic of Ireland. Records began in 1931 in Northern Ireland and since then, 14,767 people have been killed on the roads. This means that 38,519 people have died on Irish roads since the record system was first put in place.” The following year, the RSA revealed alcohol had been a factor in 38 per cent of all road deaths between 2008 and 2012.READ MOREThe progress made over the decades has been remarkable, though understandable concern remains about recent increases; there were 182 people killed in road crashes in the Republic in 2025, according to the RSA, up from 171 in 2024. Road safety awareness is a relatively recent development; the RSA was established in 2006, taking over from the National Safety Council. The previous year there were 399 deaths on Irish roads. Fifty years after Molloy’s plaintive letter, in 2022, 155 people died in road crashes. Many factors contributed to the improvement, including the quality of roads and cars, but much effort was also expended on education and high-profile campaigns warning about the dangers of drink driving. This makes it all the more puzzling that the RSA even considered it was a good idea to install breathalysers in pubs and hotels; as reported this week, it has been ordered by the Minister of State for Road Safety Seán Canney to abandon this plan, as it was “offering ambiguity”.[ Drug-driving surging due to ‘really concerning’ rates of cocaine useOpens in new window ]He is surely right. As far back as 1969, as the breathalysers were introduced, this newspaper wondered whether it would be possible in time “that the only way in which the testing of a driver for the exact amount of alcohol in his blood can be applied ... will be to assert that a driver with any alcohol at all in his bloodstream should not drive? It would, in effect, bring us back to the old thesis on drinking and driving; if you drink, don’t drive. And who could say that our accident statistics would be any the worse for that?”If it was an old thesis in 1969, it surely should be more than well established by now.[ All cars should have inbuilt breathalysers to combat drink-driving, Oireachtas committee toldOpens in new window ]