Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Labour)

I fundamentally disagree with the Minister. While he refers to responsibility to do this, that and the other, including programmes, activity and so on, it is precisely because people have all these responsibilities that there is a need to keep a clear focus on a strategy. There is no reference to a strategy in the legislation. The Minister talks about programmes and the fact that the Minister may require them to produce a programme. The requirement needs to be much stronger than that. There needs to be a strategy. We have been working with strategies. Programmes are different from a strategy. There needs to be a national strategy on road safety. It should be the principal function of the authority, which should be spelt out clearly. The Minister has not given a reason for not accepting the amendment. He said he agrees in principle with the sentiment in it. Why not state this specifically in the legislation because it is what we need to focus on? It should not be just at the whim of the Minister of the day to request programmes and so on, which is the case currently.

It is all very well to say we regard it as an important issue with which we are dealing. The reality is that if one looks back to 2003 and most of 2004, we did not have a road safety strategy, because the Minister was busy doing other things. Priority was not given to a strategy for road safety. It must become the primary function of the new authority. There is no point having a strategy unless the Minister puts in place a mechanism for measuring performance. We have been very weak on this aspect in the past. The Minister is saying, on the one hand, that he is giving power to the authority to collate all the information, build up the different data required and, on the other, he is saying he does not expect the authority to do anything in particular with the data. The data must be used to inform the strategy and performance indicators must be set to ensure everyone is doing their part, particularly the road safety authority and all the other agencies involved. It is a key part of what we understand to be the role of the new authority, so why not say so explicitly?

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