Mr. Sam Waide:

Building on what the chief superintendent has said, there is a specific action within the strategy. I welcome the opportunity to raise this because I can go back to the earlier question of how the Deputies and Senators as a committee can help. The road traffic Bill was referred to by the Chairman and one of the items in Part 3 is linking the licensed drivers to registered vehicles. That will assist in the enforcement of the people who demonstrate poor behaviour and break the law. It will also assist An Garda Síochána in identifying drivers correctly against penalty points.

I will touch on some other parts of the Bill and I ask the committee to support the legislation. There are elements of antisocial and dangerous off-road use of scramblers and I know it has been discussed previously. A member of the committee mentioned insurance earlier and in Part 4 of the Bill there is a technical amendment that will allow vehicle insurers to share details of policy cover with members of An Garda Síochána in real time. Finally, part of the Bill deals with uninsured vehicles. We know from evidence and research that uninsured vehicles are more likely to engage in riskier and potentially dangerous behaviour on the roads. Part of the Bill will enable us to get that shared information from insurers. Insurance Ireland is a delivery partner within the road safety strategy.

We touched on the final part of the Bill in detail earlier and it deals with speed. It considers the varying of speed limits, primarily on the M50. As An Garda Síochána colleagues indicated earlier, we have looked at other countries and visited other jurisdictions to look at the varying of speed limits not just to change the behaviour of drivers in order to be safer but in order to link to weather conditions, for example. In Madrid, for example, the varying of speed limits is linked to pollution levels. There are a number of items in the Bill that I ask the committee to support.