Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that tragedy is always a surprise to the relatives. Like most people in this country, I have had members of my extended family killed on the roads.

Relatives are on the sharp end of an accumulation of errors and madness which ends up in a hospital morgue. And from the hospital morgue to the sleepless nights, to a series of tear-stained Christmases and to the years of grief.

But, to those who are not relatives of the deceased, the overwhelming majority of road traffic accidents are not such an impenetrable mystery. A thread leads back from the hospital morgue, through a series of mistakes and bad driver behaviour, and that thread leads straight back to your ordinary driver going about his or her daily business . . . in other words, us.

We've blamed bad roads, we've blamed old cars, we've blamed the street lighting. But surely it's all down to bad driving. Is that so very difficult for us to understand? If you have a whole country where drivers have given up indicating . . . the most simple and effortless driving manoeuvre now that you don't have stick your hand out the window anymore . . . it is a fairly safe bet that they have given up showing any consideration for other road users.

Before we have to shell out another couple of million euro on yet another Task Force, and before another couple of hundred people die, wouldn't it be simpler to adopt a zero tolerance policy to bad driving? Just as New York once adopted zero tolerance to crime, on the basis that urinating on the street generated a disrespectful atmosphere which in turn led to more serious crimes.

There is an argument that, in a country where rampant individualism is now a life philosophy, the road accident rate is going to be pretty high.

Actually, that's not an argument, it's a safe bet. If people think they can park where they like, turn when the fancy takes them, and that anyone who tries to prevent them doing this is a threat to their freedom, then you can be fairly certain that they're not going to worry about overtaking in fog.

Rampant individualism, so attractive in many ways . . . er, can't think of one at the moment . . . is of very little help when it comes to minor matters such as road safety or running a health service. Rampant individualism runs on the basis that most of the material of daily life is a minor matter and that anyone who tries to enforce the rules governing it is at once petty and a fascist . . . rampantly individualistic societies are not distinguished by their sense of proportion.

New York, too, was once viewed as a city of bolshie mavericks who would not take kindly to state regulation. But in fact zero tolerance is probably the only answer to the anti-social behaviour engendered by rampant individualism, because zero tolerance removes all possibility of wriggling and manoeuvre by the transgressor.

You can drive from one end of this country to another without seeing a police officer, except for a brief glimpse of an unwashed garda car as it swerves off the motorway without indicating. If I was Michael McDowell, I would be (a) a little bit worried about the election and (b) preparing to put every garda I had on the streets enforcing the traffic laws. If you throw everything you have at driving, you catch a lot of criminals in the process.

One of the most fascinating things about covering the Paul Ward trial, all those years ago, was the fact that Charles Bowden, portrayed as a criminal mastermind who was a drug dealer and part of the gang which murdered the late Veronica Guerin, had neither tax nor insurance on his car. How different a lot of lives might have been if the traffic laws had actually been enforced in that instance.

I leave you with that thought, as I drive off into the sunset.

Ann Marie Hourihane has left the building