Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

The reality is that more people died on the roads here in January 2006 than during the previous January. A crisis, therefore, exists and the Minister assures us it will be addressed. We do not have the 1,000 strong dedicated traffic corps he promised us. More than 1,500 gardaí are sitting behind desks and doing work that could be done by civilians, the highest percentage of any police force in Europe. He has done nothing about that, despite his commitment in 2002 to deal with it as a priority. We have 31 new penalty point offences, yet these do not include using hand-held mobile telephones while driving a car. When will the Minister address that issue? This is another bit of old guff from himself and the Department of Transport.

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