Mr. John Twomey:

If it is okay I will deal with two of the issues and I will ask Superintendent O'Donohue to respond to the question on the court and court summonses.

We started off with 565 zones when the project began. The situation is under constant review. We analyse collision data for a five-year period. That highlights trends in various zones. The situation shifts constantly. This was the first time An Garda Síochána had embarked on such a contract to outsource some of its enforcement and to tell people and put on its website the locations of the speed cameras. The simple message is that if one speeds in those zones one is liable to be killed or seriously injured, more so than anywhere else on the road network. They are the areas that are most dangerous on the road network. We have given the information to the general public to ask them to slow down in the first instance because if they do not they run a far greater risk than anywhere else on the road.

The zones are constantly shifting. Compliance rates have shifted to 95%. Some areas do not shift and other areas are higher than 95%. We took zones off the list where compliance was higher and we replaced them with other areas. The analysis in 2012 and 2013 was a year older and we had more up to date information. We did change and we added to the locations. We increased the number of monitoring hours. It started off at 6,000 and we have now extended it to 7,375. As a consequence of the surveys and the increased compliance we were able to focus greater attention on the monitoring aspect of it to allow enforcement.

We focused more on certain areas because of the collision data and what it tells us. We weight the zones. If compliance levels in some zones are considerably lower than in other ones we will put increased emphasis in that area to try to bring compliance up. When we bring compliance up we increase safety and reduce road fatalities. That is the simple and single objective of the initiative; to reduce fatalities and injuries on the roads. We can achieve that by reducing speeds.

On the splitting of the dismissals in the court, it is certainly something we will take away and consider but it has not been of concern to us to date. There is no considerable differentiation between the Garda dismissals and the GoSafe dismissals. There is no noticeable difference between the two but it is certainly something that we will take away in light of the issues raised and I hope we will be able to provide the data in future.