Mr. Conor Faughnan:

I thank the Chairman and members of the committee for the opportunity to speak. The penalty points system is almost ten years old. It seems like a quick decade but a review is appropriate at this stage. AA Ireland is well known and is the major motoring organisation in this country. We have some 200,000 Irish members and we fix 140,000 cars per year. We regularly engage with the motoring public from a consumer perspective. We have a long-standing heritage as a campaigning organisation and we have a vested interest in the sense that we represent motorists from a consumer perspective. Nevertheless, we have always been very supportive of road safety initiatives and we worked in partnership with the State and its agencies over the past 15 or 20 years to promote road safety in Ireland.

Ireland’s penalty points system has been a success story. It was launched in October of 2002 and enjoyed widespread support from motorists from the start. It has been one of the key policies, along with improvements in policing, engineering and a sea change in social attitudes, that has underscored remarkable progress in improving road safety. I was very involved in the AA’s campaign to have a penalty points system introduced. I had a number of meetings with the then Minister, Séamus Brennan, to persuade him to support the idea. It is appropriate in this forum to pay tribute to the late Séamus Brennan. He was terrific and pushed through the introduction of penalty points when many others wanted to delay.

Ten years later, we are reviewing a system that is, on the face of it, very successful. It has worked brilliantly. Road deaths have halved in the past decade. We also know from the data that, when drivers gets two or four penalty points, it changes their behaviour. A driver with four points is statistically less likely to get caught again than someone who is points-free. The number of drivers accumulating multiple points, culminating in disqualification, is very small. The yellow card system works and it raises the question of why we should fix it if it is not broken.

One of the merits in the proposed changes is that it would make our system look more similar to the one that exists in Northern Ireland and the UK, such as increasing a speeding offence up to three points. There is a good reason to do that to aid future harmonisation and mutual recognition with Northern Ireland. Both jurisdictions want to see this.

The AA engages with motoring public through blogs, e-zines and our website. We also systematically research motorists' opinions through the AA motorists panel online surveys. We get fantastic levels of engagement. When we survey motorists on the issues of the day, we regularly get 12,000 completed questionnaires. For some surveys, we received over 20,000 questionnaires and hundreds of thousands of individual comments from motorists. We have a very good handle on how motorists view issues. There is widespread support when we ask about penalty points. Nearly 17% of Irish drivers have penalty points on their record currently but the vast majority of those have only one incidence of one or two points on their licences.

It gets more interesting when we ask drivers whether it was fair on the last occasion they received penalty points. Just over half of the motorist we spoke to, 50.6%, felt the circumstances in which they had received penalty points were somewhat unfair or very unfair. We received many individual comments and their tone reveals a degree of public cynicism about the way in which the penalty points system operates and the way the Garda Síochána undertakes speeding enforcement. The old barstool conspiracy theory is that it is a revenue generating exercise. That is not fair or true but the unfairness may be in the eye of the beholder. It remains a concern for policymakers, because we cannot have a motoring population that becomes cynical about road safety enforcement. It is an ongoing communications challenge for the Garda Síochána, the Road Safety Authority and the Government. If we fuel public cynicism, we will undermine support for road safety policies.

One of the suggestions in a discussion document from the Department is that speeding should become more than one offence. Exceeding the speed limit by a small margin should be in a different category from the driver with a gross violation of the speed limit. It is a reasonable proposal but it is important to put on the record the fact that the AA does not believe we can do it yet. First, we must fix the widespread problem of poorly set speed limits. We must fix that once and for all before we start policing the speed limit with greater vigour. As part of the polling exercise with motorists, we carried out a review of poorly set speed limits earlier this year. We received thousands of examples from the motoring public in a survey with more than 20,000 respondents. We shared the results with the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport and the Department is now in the process of undertaking a speed limit review. It is important that the review is completed and acted upon so that poorly set speed limits that pepper the network are corrected before we move to a stronger sanction for speeding violations.

The other eye-catching suggestion that emerged from the Department, which received much reaction from our members, is the notion that there should be tougher penalties for mobile phone use. Interestingly, motorists collectively really believe in that idea. They believe strongly that mobile phone use is an unforgivable offence. Over 17% of the motorists we polled favour an outright driving ban for a motorist caught using a mobile phone.

Some 60% of respondents expressed the view that mobile phone usage while driving should be punished much more severely than is the case. It seems to be one of those behaviours in other drivers which drives people demented. At the same time, however, more than 50% of respondents in one of our polls acknowledged that they occasionally used their mobile phone while driving, with some 40% admitting they occasionally sent a text message, even though the latter was universally acknowledged as an unforgivable behaviour. We have, therefore, a cohort of the population which is of the view that these offences should be punished very severely, while, at the same time, the people concerned admit that they will occasionally engage in these behaviours themselves. Moreover, the motorists to whom we talk are invariably of the view, where they were apprehended for such behaviour in the past, that the garda in question dealt with them unfairly. In other words, there is a clear disconnect between what people say and what they do. As such, I caution against giving undue weight to a populist line which might lead one to assume there is strong support for very severe punishments. I am certain that if such an approach were taken, we would soon discover that while support for harsh punishments might be very wide, it is not very deep. People will inevitably and rapidly turn against a system they consider to be too severe.

We must be cautious in introducing changes to the system. For example, while 17% of people expressed the view that motorists caught using a mobile phone while driving should be put off the road, most of us would agree that this seems rather too severe. One of the issues to bear in mind as we review the penalty points system is that punishments must remain proportionate to the offence. This is essential if we are to ensure a driver's penalty points status accurately reflects his or her behaviour and collision risk. Penalty points status is one of the factors the insurance industry takes into account when assessing risk. The EU gender directive which comes into force at the end of this year will lead to an even greater forensic focus on penalty points because gender will no longer be permissible as a risk assessment factor. It is vital that there should be no disconnect between a driver's points status and a genuine underlying accident risk. If penalty points are handed out like confetti for relatively trivial offences, such a disconnect is unavoidable.

A phenomenon that is not widespread but which requires close observation - perhaps specific legislative provision - is that of penalty points swapping. When we asked motorists whether they had ever been asked to accept penalty points on another driver's behalf, 2% confirmed that they had. There are two distinct circumstances in which such a scenario might arise. The first is where a person, for a variety of reasons, accepts a penalty points sanction on behalf of his or her spouse or partner. The second scenario is where an individual with an out-of-State licence volunteers that licence in the knowledge that no penalty points can be applied to it in order to allow an Irish licence holder to escape sanction. For example, in the case of a couple where one partner is British and the other Irish, the British licence is invariably volunteered for sanction. That loophole must be closed. There is also evidence - although it is anecdotal and should not, therefore, be overstated - of employers engaging in systematic penalty points swapping. Where, for instance, there are six drivers in a fleet, it might be the established custom that whenever any of them is intercepted by a speed camera, the out-of-State licence is volunteered for sanction. As I said, this type of practice is not widespread, but it is certainly happening. If the legislation is being reviewed, consideration should be given to strengthening existing provisions or introducing sanctions to close the loophole that is being exploited in this way.

In some ways, the penalty points system has become almost a victim of its own success. What I mean by this is that it is working so effectively that I find myself - members might have had the same experience - being approached by certain parties with a view to using the penalty points mechanism as a means of enforcing certain behaviours that have nothing to do with road safety. A classic example of this was when I was approached by representatives of ASH, a very worthwhile and laudable organisation which works to eliminate tobacco use in Ireland, with a proposal that smoking while driving should incur penalty points. There might be many good reasons to introduce such an offence in terms of reducing the incidence of smoking, but it has nothing to do with road safety. Penalty points might well be effective in encouraging compliance with all types of behaviours. For example, a good way of encouraging payment of the household charge would be to apply two penalty points to the licences of those who fail to do so. However, just because the penalty points system has proved so effective does not mean we should abuse it or leverage in other issues that have nothing to do with road safety.

Penalty points must remain exclusively a road safety measure and a driver's penalty points status must be an accurate reflection of past behaviour and future risk. By applying conditions that bear no relation to road safety concerns or punishing relatively routine traffic offences with penalty points sanctions that are too severe we would quickly be facing two consequences. First, we would create a disconnect between penalty points status and collision risk which would undermine the usefulness of the penalty points system for insurance purposes and, second, we would erode the broad public support for the way in which the system operates, a support that has been persistent for the past ten years. For these reasons, I counsel the committee against an emotional response which might lead to a system that is needlessly and disproportionately severe in some areas.

A review of the penalty points system is appropriate, but it should be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It is a system that has served us very well and is working effectively. There is certainly a need to facilitate future harmonisation with the systems in Northern Ireland and Britain. In addition, there may be room for tweaking punishments and introducing new offences. However, it is a question of fine tuning and evolutionary amendments rather than radical or drastic change. Within these caveats, the AA will be very happy, as, I am sure, will the vast majority of motorists, to support some of the proposals the Department is bringing forward in terms of changing the system.