Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick, Fine Gael)

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill. I wish the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport well. The issue of road safety can be considered under the three headings of enforcement, engineering and education. We are dealing with the question of enforcement today. Deputies from all sides of the House have spoken eloquently about the changes proposed in this legislation.

I take this opportunity to ask the Minister to consider two elements of road safety that can be lost in the haze and the noise for budgetary and administrative reasons. The first element is engineering. There is no doubt that we have a very good interurban road network. As Deputy Coffey said the locations where 212 people lost their lives last year are predominantly to be found beyond our motorway and national road network. Most of them died on our secondary, regional, tertiary and local roads. I represent a community that has been ravaged by road carnage in recent years. I appreciate that the same problem is being experienced in other counties. I am not suggesting that any case is worse than the next.

In the part of the country I represent, there have been multiple fatalities on a particular stretch of the N21, which is the road between Limerick and Tralee. Over the past eight years, a life a year has been lost, on average, on a stretch of road that is less than three miles long. That is a frightening statistic for those who use the road. Most of those who died were young people from the locality. I appreciate that the National Roads Authority and the local authorities face particular constraints at the moment. In the aftermath of the Meath bus crash, I did not imagine we would allow our national road infrastructure to deteriorate to the point where more cars are being put on to dangerous roads.

The reality is that accidents do not generally happen on motorways because traffic is segregated. They predominantly happen on small roads in isolated rural areas at weekends. I am not trying to dilute the fact that alcohol plays a huge part in such accidents. The same is probably true of drugs. The reality is that the condition of many roads has been allowed to deteriorate. Nobody maintains the roads or the drains. The surfaces of our roads are being destroyed by the water that is allowed to flow along them. One has to engage in a "dodge the pothole" exercise in some instances. As a result, people are having to drive dangerously and thereby increasing their chances of having an accident.

Without labouring the point made by Deputy Coffey, I should mention that if one drives from Killarney to the Ring of Kerry, one might encounter sheep or rocks or anything. One will also find signposts saying that one can legally drive at 100 km/h. By contrast, if one drives from Dublin to Limerick one will encounter speed limits of 80 km/h and 100 km/h on certain parts of the motorway that are capable of being upgraded to 120 km/h. Like many users of the road, I think the existence of these lesser speed limits is a revenue-generating exercise. The perception that exists is that people are sitting on the hard shoulder and collecting cash.

I welcome the work the Road Safety Authority has done. Although I should not name people in the Dáil, I pay tribute to the chief executive of the RSA, Mr. Noel Brett. As I said previously to the Minister, he has been an exceptional public servant, with his team, in terms of driving home the message on road safety issues. One need only look at the recent advertising campaigns to see this.

It must be an awful experience for the local emergency services, priests, ministers and doctors to have to go to a house to give the bad news that a son or daughter will not be coming home that night because they have been killed in a road accident. Anything we in the House can do must be welcomed. I encourage the Minister, with his colleagues, the Minister for Education and Skills and the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, to examine at Cabinet sub-committee level the issue of road safety. It is not a single Department issue but a multifaceted issue which involves the local authorities, education and the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport. I hope the Minister will take this suggestion on board and not just consider enforcement but also the concerns raised here in regard to engineering. The priority is that local councils deliver a safe road infrastructure for people to use.

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