Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)

I asked about the strength of the traffic corps and its current organisation. Perhaps the Minister of State might liaise with the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Shatter, in order to provide me with some answers, even outside the Chamber.

I refer to learner drivers concerning whom the Minister, Deputy Shatter, recently gave me some figures. Some 45 learner drivers were involved in fatal collisions during the past three years, 26 of whom were killed in those collisions. The PARC road safety group, known very well to me and to the Minister of State's colleague and fellow Minister of State, Deputy O'Dowd, from the time the two of us were transport spokespersons, told me that when gardaí set up checkpoints during March and April of this year, they found that 43% of learner drivers had no accompanying driver and that a further 30% were driving without "L" plates, which is completely unacceptable. Will the Minister for Justice, or the Minister for Transport, Deputy Varadkar, take some action on that?

I have another query in respect of penalty points. We are told that some 300,000 people have been stopped on Irish roads who produced an Irish public driving licence but subsequently escaped having penalty points. In a previous arena, when the Minister of State, Deputy O'Dowd, and I were covering transport we sought for penalty points to be applied to drivers from Northern Ireland. I am not sure if that has been achieved but the situation with other EU drivers presents an enormous problem because some non-Irish licence holders have been involved repeatedly in serious collisions. Has anything been done about that?

I refer to drug driving, a subject we used to discuss. We used to ask why we could not be more like the Australians and have the test that country has established in states such as Victoria and New South Wales. Has there been any change in that area?

Cultural attitudes to drink driving have changed, We saw this recently in the Minister of State's personal portfolio area during the European Championships which, unfortunately, did not offer a great national performance. One could see, however, that people did not risk driving to venues where they could see the game.

The Minister of State, Deputy Ring, is very active in the area of sports. Perhaps the Minister for Transport, Deputy Varadkar, should concentrate on the nitty gritty of his own portfolio and ensure that the key elements that need to be implemented in transport are implemented. After all, there is no transport capital programme. Most of the programme that Deputy O'Dowd and I covered has not been implemented.

See this speech in context