Mr. John O'Brien:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to address it. Perhaps I should state at the start that I am not a Garda spokesman, although I may sound and look like it occasionally. Any of the views that I have are purely my own, but they are informed by 38 years in the Garda Síochána.

I was the head of the Garda national traffic policy bureau in 1997, which was the first time the bureau was put in place to deal with road fatalities. Having left the Garda in 2008, I did a review of the fixed charge penalty system for the Office of the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission. That formed the basis of my interaction with the committee.

All of the controversy with which we have become familiar in the past 12 months was totally avoidable because all of the issues were raised in the GSOC report, which made 18 recommendations and eight or nine significant findings. It was all flagged in the report but the report never saw the light of day. It is not because I wrote it that it is a particularly good report, but it did highlight the issues that are in the Comptroller and Auditor General’s four reports. We had a long sequence going back to 2008, when the report was carried out, and it was presented in 2009. What happened in the past year was totally avoidable because we had seen all of the symptoms. We knew that the system was creaking and leaking.

I will spend a few minutes on the fixed charge processing system. It is essentially a system that takes between 400,000 and 500,000 inputs every year from fixed-penalty notices. When I was a young garda they were called on-the-spot fines. Not all of the fixed charge penalty notices are of supreme relevance to road safety or road deaths. They are for a whole series of minor road traffic offences that in themselves would not merit going to court in the first instance but within that there is a relatively small cohort of speeding offences that are now detected by the Garda Síochána and by the GoSafe consortium by means of non-intercept, which means there is no connection between the detecting person and the individual that is detected.

I said the system was leaking badly, but the most classic mistake is that the worst offenders escape. That has been the case since 2007 and I am sure it was the case before that. They escape by ignoring the system. They simply do not interact. The other weakness in the system is that registered companies are not persons so under the system they cannot be prosecuted or processed as an offender under the fixed charge penalty system unless a series of other processes take place.

I also wish to say, perhaps a little controversially, that every time a detection is made for speeding using the automatic detection systems of the Garda or GoSafe, it records particular kinds of information – the number of the vehicle being used, the speed, obviously, and also a photograph of the individual involved. I heard this morning some comments on how difficult it is to get third parties to admit who was driving the vehicle and I heard suggestions about amendments to the 2004 Act and another point relating to the 2010 Act. Frankly, the obligation has always existed for registered owners to say who was driving. If I as a garda in the old days had alleged that someone was using a vehicle then there would have been a legal obligation to tell me who was using it.

The point is that we are using a legal system rather than an administrative system to handle the fixed charge penalty process. One of the recommendations I made in my GSOC report is that we should seriously consider using an administrative system that does not have any of the inhibiting factors of the criminal law system and allows for a much earlier reaction. The Central Bank has the power to vote penalties under the administrative sanction process to financial institutions that involve massive fines and other sanctions. That is at the top end of the business cycle. It is entirely possible that we could use the fixed charge penalty system as an administrative process, as is done in other countries, and then for the minority of offences that are not resolved in that manner we would use the criminal process.

When I spoke to the president of the District Court and the chief executive of the courts body in 2008, they told me that the system was creaking and that they did not have the courts or the capacity to handle it. In those circumstances, is it any wonder that the worst offenders under the system escape? The system is only designed to catch and deal with the compliant. For speeding, that is about 73%, and for all offences it is about 70%. That is an inherently unfair system because the worst are escaping the sanctions of the system. It is primarily a systems failure. There are no exotic points of law involved. Penalty points were introduced in 2002 and if one was doing a review of a system one would ask why it was being done in this way because it did not have the capacity to deal with the throughput.

I mentioned the GSOC report which I authored. I had an opportunity to look at the Comptroller and Auditor General’s latest report. I am fully in agreement with the remarks he made on the €11 million subvention by the Exchequer to the GoSafe camera consortium because the return from its detections did not meet the threshold. In essence, the taxpayer had to put €11 million into the system to keep it afloat. The contract runs until 2015. I have no issue with the commercial side of the matter. It simply seems that we are getting the wrong end of it.

According to the Comptroller and Auditor General’s figures, the GoSafe figures account for 22% of speeding detections, while the Garda’s own cameras account for 24%. Numerically, I believe there are something in the range of 40 GoSafe camera vans, and the number of Garda robots, which is an unusual title – we used to call them GATSO – was 24%. Gardaí also detect speeding by hand-held laser or radar. Effectively, eight or ten Garda speed detection vans detect more than 40 GoSafe cameras. That is the logic. There are approximately four times as many GoSafe vans as there are Garda vans, and individual gardaí also detect a range of offences.

We are essentially operating what I call the Victoria model, which is something I saw in Australia. It is a road safety system predicated on a number of key points. A robust enforcement policy by the police is required, as is a strong legal system to underpin it; a high degree of education and awareness was part of the process; there was a very strong IT system, so that one had a strong platform; and also it had the key element of being an administrative system rather than a criminal legal system. That has produced enormous success. Clearly, there have been aberrations in the system, but the saving of lives and the reduction in serious injuries has been due to the effectiveness of the system. Nothing is perfect. Last year 190 people were killed, which is 190 too many, but the highest number of fatalities ever in this country was in 1972, when more than 600 people were killed on the roads in this country. We have come a long way in the meantime, rightly so.

I am in total agreement with the sentiment expressed in the Garda Inspectorate report on the faults and failings in the cancellation policy that was being employed. It is as clear as crystal that there were many inconsistencies and there was no firm policy dictating how the system operated. However, I am not in agreement with the Garda Inspectorate’s main recommendations for the future. I am quite surprised that its report, which is a far-reaching one, was accepted without debate. It was submitted into the public domain and accepted. It dealt with two separate issues, and perhaps therein lies the problem. I do not agree with the statement in Chapter 4 of the report that road traffic enforcement is not a priority for the Garda. That is totally wrong. Neither do I agree with the business case with regard to the €11 million it currently costs the taxpayer to keep the GoSafe cameras going, including the proposal that the speed detection system be transformed into a civilianised process and the Garda leave the robot vans at home. The business case does not make sense, in addition to other issues.

It makes neither economic nor operational sense and certainly does not help the targets under discussion.

While I apologise for being so lengthy, I wish to cite the comments this morning of the chief executive of the Road Safety Authority, RSA - I have a similar diagram at the end of my report - when she stated that notwithstanding the personal loss and impact on families and society in general, reducing the number of serious collisions on the roads also has a significant financial benefit. She stated that a recent evaluation of the Road Safety Strategy 2007-2012, commissioned by the RSA, states the impact and effectiveness of the strategy equates to the saving over that period of 686 fatal collisions. The numbers, in terms of people, probably would be approximately 700 because some collisions, unfortunately, have multiple victims. Her point is that over that period, there has been this enormous saving. In other words, had we done nothing and had we not introduced the Victoria model, this is the threshold at which we now would be. She also estimates, according to what I call the Goodbody formula and which has been around for a while, that the saving to the Exchequer has been approximately €1.85 billion. While I imagine this is a new figure for some people, the audited figure for the cost of a single fatal accident is extraordinarily high. She goes on to state that in the period 2003 to 2013, road fatalities reduced from 335 to 190. In my view, no other country that started from a comparable base has reached that target. Even Victoria, on which I was modelling our approach way back in the late 1990s, has not achieved that target. She states this represents a decline of 43% and that over the same ten-year period, injuries reduced from 8,262 to 6,962, which represents a 16% decline. I acknowledge that numbers do not speak to the tragedy and absolute horror of somebody losing someone in a road collision or of somebody being injured in a life-inhibiting way for the rest of his or her life, but these are figures that equate with success, not failure. The whole point at which I became involved in this thing is when I heard all of the controversy erupting around this time last year. I thought this would undermine confidence in the system and within the Garda Síochána and simply was bad for the process in which we are involved. I wanted the opportunity to make these points in a public forum and hopefully they are of some use to the committee.