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

I welcome the witnesses from the RSA and An Garda Síochána. I thank them for their comprehensive and informative contributions. What we are being told today beggars belief. We are blaming current issues on legislation going through the Dáil and filibustering. However, according to what we have heard, perhaps the Minister is not doing his job. Ms Murdock said, his departmental officials have been so busy with a one-line amendment for the past year and a half that he cannot go about his job of bundling existing road traffic legislation, which is poor as we saw in a television documentary. We heard judges, gardaí and others speak on that programme about disqualified drivers being back in court and out driving without proper action being taken. Deputy Munster put down a parliamentary question not long ago asking what the Minister had done about the bundling. We have been led to believe he put out a tender to law firms to sort out the legislation. Is the Minister focused on his job? The current legislation is a knee-jerk reaction because there was a spike in road fatalities in 2016 which was not necessarily caused by careless or dangerous driving. I was recently at a conference on road safety abroad where it was acknowledged that there has been a phenomenal uptick in traffic on the roads in this country. Those roads were left without proper maintenance over the past five or six years due to the unavailability of capital funding for local authorities.

What we have heard today is astounding. Referring to other road safety legislation when a particular incident arose, Mr. Conor Faughnan noted that one of our reactions as legislators is to enact further legislation instead of enforcing the existing law. As we have seen today, the existing legislation is not being tidied up properly. The assistant commissioner referred to two types of disqualification under sections 1(a) and (b) and the confusion that causes where people are off the road. It is astounding that the issue of people failing to hand in their licences has not been corrected. This did not arise yesterday or today. The RSA and the Garda have statistics to indicate it has been a major problem for five years. Why has nothing been done to correct that blatant flaw in the legislation?

Reference was made to the fact that a person may have the right of appeal, but perhaps the judge allowed the prosecutor to hold on to the licence until the appeal is determined. If the person was stopped on the road without his or her licence, the gardaí can double check if it is held by the courts. I am amazed that after what we have heard today regarding that the focus is on the existing Road Traffic Act being properly bundled and tidied up, and the lame excuse that a one line amendment has held up the whole show for the past year and a half.

Perhaps some of my colleagues have been over enthusiastic in their deliberations in the Dáil, but they have had only a couple of hours with the document. We have had to read up on the dossier in high-speed time overall, but the Minister and his Department have been deliberating on it for a year and a half.

With regard to the fitness of the Garda, a previous Garda commissioner has said in a different forum that perhaps the reason there are so few prosecutions is because of the presence of gardaí. This is a phenomenon; people not being prosecuted when the law is broken. If one was to follow this argument then if the gardaí did not drive around a town during a festival occasion, when there tends to be more skirmishes, there would be no prosecutions. Not having a Garda presence can mean more fights. What is the difference there? Just because there are no prosecutions it does not mean the Garda are not doing their job. We have to acknowledge this.

There will probably be a parliamentary question tabled by the end of this year regarding the more than two million breathalyser kits that have been used and how many tested positive. The figures might be low. Deputies could ask if the kits were working properly at all because such a phenomenal number of breathalyser kits had been used. I commend the gardaí, however, and they are doing their job. They have been subject to criticism and at other times they get flak during spates of robberies in rural Ireland and so on.

I expect the RSA advertising campaigns to go on, but we have yet to see a campaign that tells people they cannot drive without a licence or when they have been put off the road. It is a case of do not drink and drive, but there has been no advertisements similar to those relating to the TV licence - if one does not have a TV licence then one cannot have a television. The focus on this issue has been lost through the Minister.