Mr. Conor Faughnan:

I shall try to get through the questions quickly. There have been a lot of recurring themes and one was the setting of speed limits, which is of massive importance. Senator Terry Brennan mentioned it and so did many others. It is evident that many speed limits are ridiculous and there is a back story behind many. I got soaked in the subject when metrication was introduced a number of years ago. There is a history behind the 80 km/h default speed limit that has appeared on local authority roads. As the Senator has said, Michael Schumacher physically could not drive at that speed. Every time one sees the speed limit it undermines credibility and respect for the system. It is a glaring omission.

One of problems is that individual local authorities have the power to set the speed limit in their areas. I got into slightly hot water for suggesting that the power should be taken from them. They have had it since 1994. I know there is a philosophy of trying to democratically devolve decisions as close to the affected citizens as possible. I favour such a move in principle but in practical effect each local authority - even well-meaning - tends to apply its own version of the guidelines and criteria. A driver can cross county boundaries and discover that rules have been changed. The N4 leaving Dublin is four lanes wide and is a brand new modern highway with a central concrete barrier which means that there are no crossover accidents but an 80 km/h speed limit is applied. The same road en route to Roscommon has a single lane boreen lined with white crosses with a 100 km/h speed limit.

We have to get those correct, certainly before we make the punishments for speeding more substantive. We have raised this already and we got good support from the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Varadkar, and the Department. There is a review under way as we speak. It is a big issue but parallel work has been going on about it.

On whether the detection bands are in the correct locations, the motoring representative group says they are, despite the fact that I get regular complaints from motorists about it. The locations are picked fairly. They are based on the collision data for the past five years, so wherever speed caused a collision that is the criterion that is used to decide where the vans go. That data set is renewed but it has not been done yet. It should be renewed every year. It is due to be renewed this year. At any given time the cameras are located in places where over the past five years a disproportionate number of speeding collisions have occurred. It was always policy to signpost them and publish them on the Garda website. The intention is to be upfront and to communicate properly. The AA believes it is a good system. One gets the odd wrinkle or imperfection. We occasionally have to go to people such as Con O'Donoghue in the Garda with individual complaints we have had but, by and large, it works reasonably well. We do get some complaints about it but on the whole it works reasonably well. A key virtue of this, at least in theory, is that in doing the easy job in those known locations, the Go Safe fleet performs its own function but also frees up Garda time, so one should in theory see more gardaí out and about at other locations because the bread and butter work of policing the blackspots has been outsourced to Go Safe. In theory it works very well while in practice it works reasonably well, although it obviously needs scrutiny and constant monitoring.

Deputies Harrington, Ellis and others spoke about the importance of harmonisation across the EU. That is clearly important. The first priority for us is to harmonise with Northern Ireland and then the United Kingdom. There are different systems in many other European countries but to be honest, other than professional drivers, most of the traffic we have is cross-Border traffic on the island, or British people here and Irish people in the United Kingdom. That is the most common. We have to get that sorted out. We are not the cause of the delay. It is our friends in the United Kingdom. I do not wish to bash them because they are world leaders in road safety in many ways but they have not yet co-ordinated their own penalty points system properly. There is not, as yet, proper recognition of Northern Irish penalty points in Great Britain, let alone harmonisation across an international frontier. It is a priority for both jurisdictions, in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. We should go ahead on the island first and then have harmonisation with Great Britain and eventually have harmonisation across Europe. If we wait for a pan-European solution we would be waiting a long time before it came about.

There were some queries about accidents that are not the fault of the driver. In a lot of cases it is the road condition. Good analysis has been done on that. If anyone in the committee is interested in further reading I would recommend the European road assessment programme, EuroRAP, which can be accessed at eurorap.org. Very good analysis has been done on that, including an Irish report to which the NRA contributed along with RoadsNI.

I wish to pick through some of the other issues which are close to my heart, such as whether we are educating young drivers properly. Mr. Brett's team is involved in that area so he will probably address the issue more comprehensively than I can. The entire system for teaching and testing drivers has been overhauled. It has been dramatically improved from where it used to be. There used to be a one-year wait for a driving test but that is gone now. There has been a good reform lesson there. It is still imperfect, and there are still unacceptable wrinkles in the system - for example, whether one is likely to pass the test is materially affected by which test centre one attends, which should not be the case. There are still some concerns around the standards of driver training. There has been difficulty in getting some of the existing cohort of driving instructors up to an acceptable professional standard. The job of work is not complete but it is much better than it used to be. Previously, one went to an amateur driving instructor and did whatever one wanted. The State did not care. The State only looked at one for 20 minutes, which was the duration of a driving test, during which one never faced real road conditions - one never went to the motorway, drove at night or faced bad weather. If one could do that and behave oneself one went in an instant from being a learner driver to a seasoned, professional mature driver with a licence that would last a lifetime, provided one renewed it every ten years. That is much better now. There is essential basic training, teaching people in modules, looking at things such as motorway driving. It is much better than it used to be.

The final point has been made several times. I understand the problem of fly-tipping and, even more sinister, systematic illegal dumping. A major problem is the illegal dumping of the by-product of fuel laundering, which is a persistent organised crime problem. It is something of an unfair stereotype to say it is confined to Border counties but there is a pocket of activity in Border counties. I am in favour of anything to get those evil so-and-sos. They got Al Capone on tax evasion. I would be glad to see the Government do whatever it can to get these guys. There is a “but”, however. Smoking is ruinous to one's health. There is no doubt about it. Smoking in a car is probably worse. If one is fumbling with a cigarette box, for example, while driving a car, or if one slows down on a main road to tip out one's ashtray, that is already covered under existing road traffic law. It is an offence to drive a vehicle without due care and attention. The law cannot write down shavers, CD players, lipstick or hairbrushes, or all of the witless things that a driver might conceivably do, so there is a catch-all clause in the legislation. If one's driving is dangerous because one is doing something stupid then the law can prosecute one for that perfectly adequately under existing legislation, whether the stupid thing one is doing is littering or smoking. I would oppose the misuse of road safety legislation to prosecute other things just because the road safety legislation is the bit that works. If we want to stop people smoking in cars that is a public health issue, not a road safety issue. I do not think one can co-opt road safety law to do that. Not a single person in this room or probably in the country would defend illegal dumping out of cars but if we have a problem with that it is the dumping law that must be strengthened. It would be a major strategic mistake in the long term to co-opt an effective piece of road safety legislation and to bolt all sorts of other things on to it, whether desirable or undesirable. There is probably no better mechanism that I can think of to persuade people to pay the household charge but it has nothing to do with road safety.

If one starts to use the penalty points system for other social issues of that nature, one will have two effects. The first is that it will cease to be of any use to the insurance industry in terms of measuring risk and, second, one will lose the support of the motoring population who have bought into road safety policies and have changed. The group most entitled to credit for the improvement in road safety is the Irish motorist. Irish drivers have bought into road safety policies. The drink driving limit was reduced in 1994 from 100 mg to 80 mg. It was hugely controversial at the time and lots of people resisted it. Last year it was reduced from 80 mg to 50 mg amid universal public acclaim. That tells one the sea change in public attitudes that has taken place towards road safety in the past ten to 15 years. That has been underscored by sound policies that have concentrated on road safety and have brought the public with them. If we start to misuse road safety law just because it is effective in order to police the topical issue of the day it would probably work for smoking or for dumping but it would be a long-term strategic mistake in terms of road safety law.