(The Nationalist, 18 July 2003)
Language is a powerful but sensitive human instrument. It can reveal or conceal truth. It can clarify or confuse issues. It is an instrument in human hands. All language is symbolic and symbols are powerful. All depends on how we use language. It has often been said that the first casualty in war is truth, and that is surely correct, but it is not only in war that this happens.
Look at another situation. A careful, conscientious driver has a momentary lapse in attention, distracted for a second or two, perhaps by a roadside advertisement, and tragedy results – a person is killed. We call that an accident.
Another person goes to a pub for an evening’s drinking, and then tries to drive home while drunk. Tragedy results – a person is killed. We call that also an accident.
In each case, there was no intention to kill; in each case a person was killed. But does that make them the same? In the first there was a simple, understandable lapse which every driver knows that he or she has avoided on occasions only by a hair’s breadth. In the second case, a person knowingly walked into a situation where a collision was a likely consequence.
Yet we describe both as accidents. By using the same language for the two, are we not putting them on a par, as if they had the same significance? But they are not on a par; they do not have the same human significance. Deaths from drunken-driving and so-called joy-riding – it should be called death-riding – are not accidents. They are manslaughter by negligence, because the driver neglected to take due care.
In some countries, being drunk while driving increases a person’s responsibility before the law and is considered an aggravating circumstance. In Ireland, it diminishes a person’s responsibility and is considered a mitigating circumstance: ‘Ah, sure, the poor fellow was drunk; he didn’t know what he was doing’.
It reminds me of those occasions when paramilitaries plant a bomb so as to kill a “legitimate target”. Instead, innocent passers-by are killed, capital punishment meted out to them for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Afterwards, the paramilitaries issue an apology, saying, ‘We never meant to kill those people; we regret their deaths; it was not meant to happen like that’. But if you set off a bomb in a public place you can expect death to follow. You cannot truthfully call it an accident.
Let’s call things by their name.