Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

Enforcing the law, ensuring it is applied and knowing that people cannot escape its long arm are at the heart of the motion. It makes a mockery of our system if we do not catch up with those breaking the law. I acknowledge the sentiment behind the motion because we have work to do in this regard.

We must acknowledge that road safety has improved, but we have set the bar on what can be done far too low. We have nearly become accustomed to hundreds of people dying on the roads every year. Only when it strikes among our friends or families is the harsh reality brought home. We must have a harsher regime for those who break the law.

I agree with Deputy Barry Andrews in that, while Gay Byrne is an iconic figure to anyone over the age of the Deputy or me, he does not represent anything to many others, particularly recent immigrants to our island. We must focus on immigrants from Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. They are used to a driving regime in which road accidents occur at double if not treble our rate. In Lithuania, there are nearly 250 road deaths per million population compared to under 100 road deaths per million here. The culture of complacency is alive and well in many of the countries that joined the European Union recently. We must get through to them in terms of their culture in whatever way is possible and I suspect Gay Byrne is not the appropriate role model in this case. We need a rethink in that regard.

I am not convinced that the rather harsh road safety campaigns are getting through to the boy racer. People tend to ignore that message in the same way they ignored the "Smoking Kills" message on cigarette packets. Perhaps there are better ways of doing that.

Proper enforcement of speed limits is vitally important in the fight to improve road safety. We should consider the propensity in recent years towards driving ever larger cars, and particularly the rise of the SUV which is more susceptible to roll-over but also has a much higher axle weight. If we consider that momentum is the mass of a vehicle multiplied by the square of the speed, these larger vehicles are inherently more dangerous. We should consider carefully whether applying the same speed limits to SUVs as we would to smaller road vehicles is entirely appropriate. We have lower speed limits for heavy goods vehicles, for instance, because they have a larger weight and are more difficult to slow down in an emergency. My colleague, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Gormley, along with the Minister for Finance, Deputy Cowen, is bringing in a system of carrots and sticks, so to speak, to encourage lower carbon emissions but I suspect this will not have an impact on the mindset of the typical SUV purchaser who will perhaps wear it as a badge of pride that they have a G carbon rating on the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez that they drive. One way of getting through to those drivers would be to impose a slightly lower speed limit to curb their excesses and remind them that these very large vehicles are potentially more dangerous on the road not just because of the momentum, but also their height off the ground. Having two young children, I am acutely aware of the visibility of small children on the road and the fact that children who are, for example, a metre tall often are much less visible behind the hood of one of those large vehicles at a crossing point. We should figure that into our calculation of the dangers of SUVs.

I spoke about the need to emphasise the importance of road safety to our recent immigration population and the need to consider SUVs and the possibility of introducing lower speed limits for some of the more outrageous models of that particular species. I will conclude by referring briefly to the problem of drink driving. There has been a strong media concentration on the need to sustain a rural way of life, which I fully endorse, but I suspect we have put far more emphasis on the needs of older male drinkers who drive to the pub for one or two drinks. We appear to be pulling out our hair over that when we should concentrate more on the needs of women who are more likely to drive to bingo or to do the shopping and who have very different needs. If we spent a small fraction of the attention we focus on the older rural male driver on the needs of women and, particularly, mothers in rural areas, I suspect we would find better solutions more appropriate to the needs of rural Ireland and could draw attention to the solutions that are required.

I welcome the Fine Gael motion. It is vitally important to bring attention to road safety and the need to have proper implementation of the law. We should examine innovative solutions to try to reduce the ongoing tragedy of deaths on our roads.

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