That's current public perception of government performance on road safety.

There's the NCT, widely seen as doing nothing more than coining money for government by finding perfectly safe cars slightly cock-eyed as to their headlights.

There's the recent announcement of location shifts for speed cameras.

Think deckchairs, Titanic.

There are penalty points, which for one brief shining moment scared the hell out of all drivers and then joined the lottery of nasties not worth bothering your little head about.

Meanwhile, to paraphrase Yeats, we have no joy, nor rest, nor peace, for drivers die and die. Most of them young, gifted and male.

Which, by the social nature of things, means they often take a car-full of peers, male and female, with them. It is a tragedy. A chronic disaster.

And it will do the government not a whit of harm in the impending election.

This is partly because the chronic nature of the problem reduces what risk analyst Peter Sandman calls the "dread factor". Drivers sitting into their cars tomorrow morning may be concerned about having slept five minutes too long, or bothered about an upcoming presentation, or irritated by a recent family argument. None of them will, full of personal dread, clutch the steering wheel, thinking "Today is the day I may die on the road". Some people do that in planes.

Nobody does it in cars, although the risk of death is hugely greater in a car than in a plane.

The second factor reducing the electoral relevance of road carnage is, ironically, the age and gender of those most vulnerable. Young men. Hormones on the hoof, divilment in the brain, risk in the genes. Since Neanderthal times, they've been the ones living on the adrenalin high of danger. On the hunting field, on the killing fields of war. Breaking the horses, drinking the pints, smoking the fags and the banned substances. Dancing, mating and fighting.

Not many voters really believe laws could change the behaviour of a generation of life's natural risk takers. Not at the historic moment in Irish history when they have the money to kill each other in bigger, faster and classier marques.

(Oddly, many belonging to precisely that cohort of Irish emigrants are among the safest drivers in America, because they're illegal aliens and can't afford to be stopped by a cop for even minor infractions of the traffic code. Fear, if it's immediate, potent and personal, is remarkably effective as a behaviour-changer. ) The fact is that although ostensibly the nation cares deeply about death on the road, it will never vote a government out of office based on its road safety record.

Rather the contrary. Seasoned Fianna Failers still talk, more than a decade later, of Michael Smith, when Minister for the Environment in Albert Reynolds' administration, reducing the level of alcohol drivers could have in them, and of him losing his seat as . . . they would believe . . . a direct result of this praiseworthy move.

They link this to research done for the party in the aftermath of the local elections, which showed that traditional Fianna Fail voters want government to do things for them, not to them.

NCT, speed cameras and penalty points add up, as far as that vital voter is concerned, to "Nanny Statism" and the message taken by Fianna Fail from this is "We were lucky to get away with Micheal Martin's smoking in the workplace ban. Let us eschew publicly punitive moves, morally admirable though they may be, coming up to 2007." (The hard chaws would not put it in quite those terms, but that's the received wisdom. ) Not surprisingly, then, last week's Prime Time featured the parents of two brothers killed in the last weeks of 2005 but couldn't get a government minister as spokesperson. That's significant. When government sends out a backbencher to defend the fort, it tells you this is a no-win fort. It tells you road safety is morally worth tackling and politically worth avoiding.

Which, it might be argued, offers a wonderful opportunity to the opposition: an issue on which any individual spokesperson could campaign with relentless passion so as to personify it. Mr or Ms Road Safety.

Thus far, however, the opposition have notably confined themselves to ritual bitching, mostly at Dail committees, rather than real campaigning. They, too, know this is an issue of no more than transient voter outrage. Strong and effective action on all fronts from speed cameras to enforcement would damn the political party taking it. It would be seen as controlling the young and the reckless by punishing the rest of us. Parties with a strong middleaged vote, like Labour and Fine Gael, don't need that.

The Greens would prefer to have us on public transport or bikes. Sinn Fein is not going to tick off its key market: the young males attracted by their sniper tee-shirt risk-favouring ethos.

The political parties seem happy enough to cede the Mr Road Safety role of road safety leadership to the former chairman of the National Safety Council, Eddie Shaw. His leadership is impassioned, saintly and technically ineffective: it attracts attention and admiration, not tangible change.

When Eddie Shaw gets agitated, he looks like a squirrel nibbling nuts that have gone off. On Prime Time, he looked like the nuts belonged to John Ellis, as Ellis filled the airwaves with George W-type appeals for more research, discussion and consultation. George W wants all that stuff before we commit ourselves to believing in global warming.

The government wants it to prevent us doing something rash like making penalty points actually work, as they did in the very beginning.

Eddie Shaw, nut-nibbling to keep from hitting Ellis, indicated that the time for discussion, consultation and collegial guff is long past.

Government has developed a great road safety policy, he admitted. Pity they don't implement it.

It is, of course, still possible that road safety will edge its way into the election shortlist of issues. If failure to implement its demonstrably fine road safety policy were seen by voters as part of a wider picture of government incompetence, then it would certainly be there.

Embarrassment at being one of the few, if not the only nation in the EU to go backwards last year on road mortality might put it on the election agenda. If a prominent politician were to buck the Michael Smith precedent and push hard to control speeding drivers, that would do it.

For the moment, though, it's sound and fury without general election implications.