Joe McHugh (Donegal North East, Fine Gael)

I will focus only on the preventative educational aspects of the issue. I have a few questions in that regard.

Before I ask them I acknowledge some locally-based and locally-designed intervention models. In particular, I put on record the efforts of a partnership approach in County Donegal which had a successful road show recently. There were participants from the ambulance service and the Garda, as well as families who lost loved ones and other people involved in car accidents. It was a very dramatic and hard-hitting road show. It should certainly be emulated in other parts of the country.

I have questions on the Road Safety Authority's role in working with the Department of Education and Science. How does the Road Safety Authority intend to work the mechanics of its proposals on education and awareness through the school system if there is no effort on the part of the Department of Education and Science to change the curriculum, redesign courses or introduce lessons into the school system?

Perhaps there is action behind the scenes of which I am not aware. It is required and must be done through a radical overhaul of the education system. We should bring driving instructors into classrooms to talk to 13 and 14 year olds and get such pupils started on the theory aspect of learning to drive. Instructors should also speak to them about the practical sides of learning to drive.

I visited Crana College in Buncrana in the past month and asked both male and female students what subject area they wished to discuss with me. They wanted to discuss cars, driving and test waiting times. These were 14 and 15 years olds. We have an opportunity to harness that energy in a positive way but the only way we can do so is by creating new modules, changing the curriculum and radically overhauling the system. Pupils would then be learning about a topic they are interested in rather than continuously being force-fed different aspects of the curriculum.

The curriculum has not evolved in the past 20 years. I was a teacher in 1993 and pupils are currently learning the same core subject topics which I taught then. They are still learning the same core subject topics that I learned when I took my intermediate certificate, as it was then known, in 1986. It is time we use education as a mechanism to overhaul the curriculum in a positive way.

We should start teaching the basics of driving skills at a practical and theoretical level by bringing the people who know how to do it into the system. We should not necessarily delegate such a task to teachers, as they are in schools to teach the sciences and arts to pupils rather than teach them how to drive. We should be radical and use this opportunity to overhaul the system.

At some stage, perhaps next week or in a fortnight or a month's time, we will be faced with another big issue of carnage on the roads, like the five young people unfortunately killed in Inishowen approximately two years ago. We will be faced with another sensational topic and everyone in the House will say how terrible it is. This week the issue was cocaine and a few weeks ago it was gangland murder.

We are becoming a reactionary House that acts on every issue sensationalised in the media. It is time to intervene and be positive and creative. We should be proactive in creating the society we want rather than reacting to every issue that is being sensationalised. We should be clear, constructive and radical in overhauling our education system.

See this speech in context