Martin Cullen (Waterford, Fianna Fail)

There is evidence based on that issue. I have power to make regulations to prohibit and go further. However, we must strike a balance and I would like to get public buy-in to the approach we are taking in all these areas. The Deputy is right to acknowledge we are generally in agreement that we wanted to start with the obvious one. I would like some more information on it. It feeds into the European regulations that may be made and getting agreement in Europe.

A person said to me that having a passenger in the car and chatting with the passenger is equally bad, and worse still is trying to control one's children in the back seat of a car. I am not saying everybody has that problem but there are inevitably day to day distractions within a car and I am trying to strike a balance on what one does in a car. Obviously the important thing is to concentrate on one's driving.

We have made the right start in terms of hand-held mobile phones. I accept this issue will not go away because of the expansion of technologies. The Road Safety Authority has a keen interest in what is happening in this area. I would like to see a European approach to this issue. At a European Council meeting in a general discussion on road safety, I raised the matter of a European-wide set of regulations and standardisation.

We will come to another amendment later with which I have much sympathy, where the Deputy talks about tinted glass in cars. That is a genuine issue and one that will have to involve manufacturers. Some of these issues will involve some agreement between the different promoters of this type of equipment and how we use it.

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