Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We are here to discuss the issue the Minister of State has asked us to discuss, which is whether we will have pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill. The Minister of State has outlined that he would prefer to have it done and the committee would like to scrutinise it in advance. I have looked at the Bill and it would be appropriate in this instance that we allow it to happen, for all of the reasons outlined by the Minister of State.

There are serious issues with the increase in road accidents. There is an old adage that says when people are talking about an issue, it starts to register in the consciousness of people. Nothing could be more the case when it comes to driver behaviour and correlation with either announcements on deaths on the roads or new laws and legislation being introduced. I take the point my good friend Deputy Martin Kenny spoke about. We have to be careful that we do not become so overburdened with law that we annoy people. There is a cohort of drivers out there and other than enforcement we will never change their behaviour. Eventually they will get caught.

I disagree with my colleague from the Seanad who said there is not appropriate enforcement on country roads. I assure him there is. I see it regularly. Many of us are very busy in life and our consciousness drops. It is at this stage that we become very dangerous on the road. We go too fast because we are not concentrating or we are not thinking about road safety. When we speak about it in here, when it is amplified in news media and when people believe something else is about to happen it is in their minds. There is a deterrent in this in itself for the greatest cohort of drivers who are law-abiding and by and large want to obey the law. They want to drive safely but because of the busyness of their lives from time to time they go too fast. Sometimes they are not great drivers in the first instance and they are not used to the situations in which they find themselves, such as roads being wet or slippy. The approach taken by successive Ministers with responsibility for transport must continue, with the legislation being updated on a regular basis. It might not make a big difference but it creates a debate in society. It gets people thinking again that they might get caught or they might be in breach of the speed limits. This is very good.

We must be very careful about the review of certain speed limits. We have improved our road network very well. There are many blackspots for sure and we do not identify blackspots in the same way as we used to. They used to have a big red sign and we need more of these. We do not need to reduce speeds, and local authorities will have significant input on this, on the good stretches of road that we have improved. This would ultimately lead to accidents because there would be frustration where somebody who wants to get to where they need to be gets caught behind somebody obeying the law in a very rigorous way. We all know how these frustrations can lead to accidents.

The Minister of State is right to identify input from local authorities as being paramount but he still needs the tools with which the legislation will provide him to address it. The more power that is given to local authorities, the better. I am also conscious, as is the Minister of State, that often local authorities do not want powers. They like to be able to escalate something back and say it has come from the Minister. When they are given powers, exactly as a number of others have said, they can be slow to deal with them and we will not have a uniform approach. The right thing to do is to allow the Minister of State to move on this quickly. We have a responsibility to react to the statistics. For sure a number of accidents in recent months have been freaky in nature. In statistics we will always have outliers that are freaky in nature. There is a trend at present that certainly needs to be addressed in some way and the Minister of State is taking the appropriate action.