Mr. Conor Faughnan:

I wish to make a number of points in response to the issues Deputy Ellis raised. He said that he understood the common-sense, pragmatic approach of harmonising with the UK but would like to see similar harmonisation across the European Union and I completely agree. That is quite a broadly-held view but practically, it will be a long time before it is achieved. I have been reading about a pan-European system of penalty points since Mr. Neil Kinnock was the EU Commissioner for Transport 20 years ago. Everybody buys into that as an aspiration but in practical terms, in order to improve the situation in Ireland today it makes much more sense for us to co-operate first off with the neighbours, with whom there is so much interaction, commerce and so forth. That said, I would very much like to see it done across Europe eventually.

The issue that Deputy Ellis raised regarding the register of cars and company cars in particular is one that we have raised previously. Let us say I have a company car that is end-of-life, that will never pass another NCT and is possibly up on blocks or just sitting in the driveway. Someone rings my doorbell and offers me €100 for it, which sounds great. The person takes the car away but I discover several weeks later that the car has been recorded driving away from petrol stations or refusing to pay tolls or, in the worst case scenario, has been sold as a toy on the street and that youngsters have taken it to do donuts, play with it and eventually burn it out. We are aware of some situations where that has resulted in fatalities.

We have suggested previously that when a car reaches the end of its life and cannot pass an NCT any more, the last registered owner should be able to bring that car to a scrap yard and get tax back on it, a little like the coin in a supermarket trolley. If people with such cars know that if they bring it to a scrap yard they will get €200 as the last registered owner then that is what they will do. They will not just sell it casually and let some youngster drive it away and burn it out. We have suggested that on several occasions and believe that cars accrue enough tax-paid during their lifetime to cover the cost of refunding the last registered owner. A bit like the money-back bottles, it would be worth peoples' while to do the right thing with their end-of-life cars instead of just letting it drift. We would love to see that come about.

The point about drugs in combination with alcohol has been addressed by Ms Murdock and her response was absolutely correct. On the increase in fatalities among children, one should note that the increase is proportional. The Deputy knows that for many years there were 400 deaths per year on Irish roads.

In road safety terms, a lot of those were low-hanging fruit, including a ridiculous culture of drink driving and very little enforcement. In addition, there was a custom and practice to challenge everything so that guilty people were never prosecuted. That meant that over 400 people were killed on the roads every year.

As we started to get our act together on the simple policies that we knew worked elsewhere, a lot of that low-hanging fruit was taken out of it. We have therefore gone from 400 road deaths per year to fewer than 200 but because of that, however, the ones that are left are much more problematic to address. In a sense, it is geometrically more difficult to reduce from 200 to 100, than from 400 to 200. That is why a lot of those genuinely tragic and apparently random accidents appear to be more common, as one is sorting out the accidents that can be addressed. That may be one of the reasons why it is giving the appearance that child fatalities are worsening, while in absolute terms they are not.

Everybody agrees that Jake's law, which I know was supported by many parties in the Dáil, is a big issue. I did not support a blanket law to be applied to all residential areas across the country. It was not that I disagreed with the effect, but I just do not think it would achieve its objective. Our experience with blanket laws is that they turn out to be clumsy in reality and difficult to maintain. I am not convinced that they would achieve the desired effect.

To be cynical for a moment, if one has a sign up that says "Caution - children at play", why do we really believe that a sign with the number 20 on it would be more effective than that, in the absence of enforcement and other measures on foot of a blanket rule imposed from Dublin? I am not convinced that it would achieve the desired result.

We also have a circumstance where no two housing estates are alike. Some are engineered for parking arrangements and with chicanes built in to ensure that it does not arise. Some older estates might have a 300-yard straight strip run-in where a young driver could get up to 70 km/h or 80 km/h. There are ways in which those can be addressed, but they have got to be done at an individual community level. I never felt, and still do not feel, that a blanket, one-size-fits-all national law would have been the best road safety policy to pursue. That is still my view, although I accept that other views are different.