WE HAVE seen the horrendous consequences of drink-driving time and again. Alcohol is one of the biggest causes of death and serious injuries on our roads. It leaves in its wake shattered lives, destroyed families, grieving loved ones.

It isn’t only the victims who suffer. Drink-drivers who kill or injure others have to live for the rest of their lives with the knowledge of what they have done, reliving over and again in their minds the awful consequences of their selfish decision to get behind the wheel of a car while the worse for drink.

The dreadful case of hit-and-run driver Paula Robinson-Ridge is only the latest example.

She was way over the drink-drive limit when her car mounted the pavement near Micklegate Bar at about noon on March 21. The car ploughed into retired bus driver Martin Cawood and also hit American tourist Joseph Lawson. But remarkably, Robinson-Bridge didn’t stop. She drove on, despite being pursued by community nurse Patricia Rains.

Robinson-Ridge later crashed into a parked car outside a vet’s surgery more than a mile away before reversing into a police car. She is now beginning a two-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to causing serious injury by dangerous driving.

She is said to be ‘deeply remorseful’. So she should be. Mr Cawood was left with multiple injuries. He could easily have been killed, as could Mr Lawson and his family. Robinson-Ridge is lucky she doesn’t have many deaths on her conscience.

She’s lucky, too, that promised tougher sentencing guidelines haven’t yet been brought in, or she could have been facing far more than two years in jail. We hope this appalling case acts as a salutory warning to all those others who are tempted to get behind the wheel of a car when they really shouldn’t.