The 'Lo-Call Traffic Watch' signs have just appeared in my county, on the local motorway. I expect to see a proliferation of these 'shop bad drivers' on other routes soon.

And I've no intention of using the number. Even though in the past as a professional driver, I've angrily called both the garda and the phone numbers on vehicles which were, to my mind, being driven dangerously.

But now they're making it official. They want me, and you, and those drivers in front and behind you, to do the job that the garda are being paid to do.

And, anticipating the excuse, the job that the politicians are being paid to make sure the resources are there to get it done.

Besides, what makes me a prosecutor of bad drivers? If I phone in the number of a car that I believe is being driven in a dangerous manner, does that mean the driver will get a visit from the garda in the near future, with a summons for dangerous driving?

Or does it mean that they will send a car out along the Kilcullen By-Pass to chase up the offender, on my say-so? And if they catch up with him, or her, will they be depending on my evidence to convict the perp?

Truth is, they should be out there in the first place, checking for bad driving.

And I don't mean checking for speeders on the safest roads in the country, easy pickings.

There is, without doubt, some abysmally dangerous driving happening on all of our roads.

There are people hogging the overtaking lane on a motorway at less than 50mph, forcing following traffic to either flash-and-blast them until they move over, or undertake in order to get by the dangerous slowpoke.

There are truckers, and car drivers as well, who are guilty of amazingly stupid and dangerous maneuvres, which often just barely miss resulting in the injury and killing of innocent other drivers.

I see it every day. I don't see the garda seeing it every day.

I get angry sometimes, when I let myself do so. Because it is not safe for other people either if I let road rage take hold.

My anger is not so much at the stupidity that I see all around me every time I drive as at the lack of enforcement of the basic driving laws in this country.

There is an Irish political thing: every time there's an outcry about something, or a tragedy, our politicians bring in new laws.

This is despite the fact that there is usually a more than adequate corpus of statute already in place to deal with the perceived problem.

Except that there's most of the time no enforcement of the existing legislation, leading not just to chronic lawbreaking but also to a complete lack of respect for the law generally.

Take the current 40mph speed limit south of the Green Isle Hotel on the Naas Road. There for the very good reason that there are serious road works under way (or were, there hasn't been much activity in the last week or so).

Yet those of us who obey are being passed all the time by vehicles, including trucks and buses, continuing blithely at the normal speed limit and often beyond.

I haven't seen a speed camera around since it started. But I have seen them on motorways and broad clear main roads elswhere.

Easy pickings ...

I remember listening to a man on the Joe Duffy LiveLine during the summer who was doing his best in the middle of the night to get a garda presence to deal with an extremely drunk driver, stopped, practically unconscious, in the middle of the Newlands Cross intersection. My recollection is that he was still here more than an hour after he rang in the situation. And eventually the drunk got back into his car and drove away ...

We are daily regaled with real-life experiences of serious crime not being properly dealt with at the time, or subsequently not being properly investigated.

I wrote a piece at the time of the first introduction of penalty points which related how many infractions of existing driving regulations I encountered on one evening drive from Dublin to my Co Kildare home.

None of these things were apparently of concern to the garda. All of which were prosecutable under existing legislation.

Yet we're told recently that scores of thousands of motorists have been done for speeding since the introduction of those penalty points, probably on safe stretches of roads without a serious record of accidents.

I NEVER see a garda car or motorcyclist doing their speeding thing at an accident black spot.

I've heard the excuse given by senior garda officers that it is 'a fact' that people who speed on motorways and other safe roads are also speeders on dangerous roads, and that's why they have no ethical problem with concentrating on catching them on the safer roads.

We USED to live in a country where you were innocent until you were PROVEN guilty.

We USED to live in a country where, before most of your times, readers, a garda would prosecute you for not having a light on your bicycle. But he only did it after he FOUND you riding your bicycle without a light.

Now, they want ME, and YOU, to Lo-Call traffic infringements.

They want me, and you, to become their unpaid informer.

It's the kind of thing that the Stasi secret police in East Germany encouraged neighbours and family members to do to each other.

With, among the other results, giving people with chips on their shoulders the chance to make unfair and untrue accusations against those they were rowing with.

And I hear this week that the Minister for Health is setting up a 'hotline' so that customers in pubs can inform the authorities that somebody is puffing a fag illegally on the premises.

I used to be very pro-garda. I used to be very much in favour of co-operating with the law.

I believed in the probability that our police were the guys charged with and paid to ensure fair play in our society, and that they should be helped whenever we could do so.

Sorry, guys. Do your own job from here on in.