John O'Mahony (Mayo, Fine Gael)

I commend Deputy O'Dowd on his presentation and recommendations for reforming legislation on the penalty points system.

All Members recall the dramatic and positive effect penalty points had on driver behaviour when they were introduced. People began to drive responsibly and reached their destinations safely, leading to a 20% reduction in road deaths by December 2002. From 2004 to 2006, all progress made was lost when road fatalities began to rise again. Why did people initially slow down and drive responsibly but then revert to speeding? They did so because there are too many loopholes in the implementation of the penalty points system. Careless and speeding drivers have a 50% chance, even if they are caught for speeding, of not having to pay a fine or of points going on their driving licences. Half of all speeding summonses have not been served and many of those served have been thrown out of court. Only one in three drivers surrenders his or her driving licence voluntarily.

While I understand there is a legislation issue, penalty points are not imposed on cars from Northern Ireland and other countries. If the present system is snowed under and unable to cope, what chance is there when the hundreds of new safety cameras are rolled out in 2008 and thousands more drivers will be caught speeding? The District Court system may collapse under an enormous volume of cases.

It is important that an education campaign is implemented to highlight the fact that these are safety cameras, not speed ones. This is the key to their acceptance when they are rolled out in several months' time. If only a few advertisements are released the week before they come on stream, the Minister will get it in the neck, as happened when he tried to implement the driving licence legislation over a weekend. The publicity campaign on safety cameras must be comprehensive. Safety cameras need to be placed on dangerous areas of the road network where a maximum number of lives can be saved rather than the soft targets of, say, 50 km zones.

A better attempt is needed to resolve this problem than that used to clear the backlog of driving tests. Today I spoke to an individual who applied for a job as a driver tester with SGS. The main criterion, he informed me, is to have had a clean driving licence for the past five years. Some testers who never did a driving test in Ireland have been employed by SGS to clear the driving test backlog. It means the numbers passed on the SGS test are higher than those tested by the Department of Transport.

I recommend the motion to the House.

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