Kevin O'Keeffe (Cork East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am talking about the image being portrayed of the few locals in the pub and the people who come back from America. They love to meet these people and have a drink with them and talk with them. These people will not be there anymore; there will be no one in the pub. These people will just come in for the one pint or two pints and we are driving them out of existence.

It has been mentioned as an area with a high suicide rate. People living at home on their own who used to come for the one or two pints down the byroads, the quiet roads in rural areas, will not be able to do this anymore. A couple of years ago I came across a GP, who loves his walking and walks a regular route going past a certain house. When the drink driving came in, he noticed the back yard filling up with empty bottles and it was filling up quicker than what it would if the man were drinking in the local pub.

No one is advocating drink driving. I am just saying that all we need to do is enforce the existing limits. That is all down to having more gardaí, particularly community gardaí who know the lie of the land. I do not know the statistics for the collisions and crashes. Are they particularly high or particularly low in certain areas of the country or do these crashes occur throughout the country? We need a greater Garda presence on the ground.