Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I did touch on road safety. Garda traffic numbers are obviously not in the Minister of State's Department, but the working group is obviously cross-departmental. The Garda traffic corps numbers are down. That is acknowledged. When are we going to see more enforcement? We had the Minister, Deputy Ross, in the Seanad yesterday alluding to road safety. The statistics for road safety are terrible. The trend is getting worse in terms of detections over Christmas, detections for drink-driving, road deaths and so on. They are not improving.

There are more people on the road and the economy is doing better than it was. One could understand how there could be a small increase based on extra volume. However, our roads are better than they used to be and our cars are probably better than they used to be. Yet the trend is unfortunately going the wrong way. Most of us who are out on the roads would acknowledge that we do not see huge amounts of Garda vehicles or checkpoints that are able to check for whatever bad driving is going on, whether it is speeding, drink-driving or drug-driving. Is there any emphasis within this report on people feeling that they are more likely to get caught? It seems that people do not think they are going to get caught and therefore take chances they might not have taken if they felt they were going to be caught. We spoke before about cars getting on at the Red Cow and getting off at the Jack Lynch Tunnel and being able to have an average speed for that journey time, as is equally the case with the Dublin to Galway and Dublin to Limerick roads. They are very easy to clock on and off. They are in other countries. Are we going to see average speed cameras and that kind of thing?