Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the delegation for its presentation. I always felt the Garda should have been running the GoSafe programme and it should never have been farmed out to a private company. Resources should have been put in place for the Garda to do it. The profits made indicate that. There would also have been fewer problems dealing with the courts.

It was said that some of the GoSafe zones have been fixed by road improvement works and so forth. Are figures for accidents going up or down in these locations? It is important we monitor those problem zones as thoroughly as we can.

We pay the likes of GoSafe based on enforcement and survey hours. Have we ever considered paying on the basis of convictions? Does the Garda monitor the qualifications of the GoSafe staff and whether they have full knowledge of the rules of the road and all the issues that arise?

I was going to talk about the alignment of the cameras. According to the reports, they were badly aligned and this could make a difference of plus or minus 5 km/h. If the alignment of the cameras is that critical and there is a standard procedure of how the vehicles are set up, could the witnesses tell us what has been done to address it and if the GoSafe staff are rectifying it? Since the witnesses said new cameras are being introduced, particularly with multi-vehicles, there must be a problem to be addressed in clearly identifying vehicles in areas where there is traffic build up and cars are coming alongside each other.

At one stage there were 1,200 members of the traffic corps and now there are 800. This weekend there will be a special operation in place and I welcome that. The Garda sergeants and inspectors have asked the witnesses and the Garda Commissioner to examine this. In 2011 and 2012 there were significant reductions of over 40% in the number of casualties. In 2013, suddenly 28 more people were killed than in 2012 and there has also been an increase this year. Is there any relationship there?