Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

I wish to introduce the Road Traffic (Amendment) Bill 2015. This Bill has come to be known as Jake's law in memory of six year old Jake Brennan, who was knocked down and lost his life at 6.25 p.m. on 12 June 2014. Jake died in his mother's arms on the street where he lived and played for his all too short young life. In truth, this Bill would not be before the Dáil today but for the determination, persistence and powerful love of Jake's family, that is, his father Christopher and his mother Roseann. I extend Members' welcome and thanks to Rosie, Chris and all the families and supporters of Jake's legacy who join Members this evening in the Gallery. Jake is not the only child to lose his life in tragic circumstances and is not the only child to be injured or killed on the roads. Between 1997 and 2012, 262 children aged 14 and under lost their lives and a further 1,115 were seriously injured on the roads. While 60% of child fatalities occurred outside built-up residential areas or in other words, in areas with a speed limit of 60 km/h or more, 57% of child injuries occurred in built-up residential areas. These are some of the statistics but as Members are aware, none of these precious children is a statistic. Jake is not a statistic.

I first met Rosie when she knocked on my front door at home in Cabra. We drank tea and talked and she told me about her Jakey, her firstborn child. She told me how she held him as he slipped away from this life. She told me that her life, as well as those of Chris, Kaelem and baby Savannah would never be the same again. She then told me she would not and could not bear for any other mother to suffer as she and her family now are suffering. She was campaigning for change in the form of a simple, straightforward, necessary and proportionate change in the law. Jake's law amounts to an amendment to the Road Traffic Acts to provide for a mandatory speed limit in housing estates, public or private, across the State.

The current position, in which speed limits in housing estates may be introduced as a matter of local authority discretion in a piecemeal fashion, is not satisfactory. It is not working and is not sufficient to protect the safety of residents and of children in particular. It is appropriate and necessary for the Oireachtas to set a mandatory speed limit for housing estates to guarantee the health, safety and welfare of all residents are protected equally. Jake's law creates a standardised statutory speed limit of 20 km/h to apply in housing estates as defined in the legislation. The objective is to introduce a level of safety to those housing estates in which children live, play chasing, kick footballs, hurl and ride their bicycles. Some will and have argued that 20 km/h is a very low limit. It is and is intended to be just that. It has been set in the knowledge that the greater the speed, the greater the chance of serious injury or death and that conversely, the lower the speed, the greater the chance of someone, and a child in particular, surviving an accident or a collision on the roads. This is the simple logic and that logic is sound.

The Taoiseach and other members of the Government, including the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, as well as his colleague, the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Kelly, in the past have pledged support for Jake's legacy and the campaign to achieve safety for children living in housing estates. In that regard, I welcome that the Government will not oppose this legislation tomorrow evening. However, I must tell the Minister that a passive stance on his part is not sufficient. This Bill requires and deserves the active support of the Government. That is what it pledged to Roseann and her family. That is what the Government signed up for when it pledged its support for Jake's legacy. I have no doubt but that when the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, speaks, he will give an account of the actions he has taken in recent months including his interactions with local authorities and the circular issued to them requiring a review of speed limits in residential areas and housing estates. I have no doubt that the Minister will refer to the report issued pursuant to this review, which set out a number of recommendations on future estate design and traffic calming measures in existing estates, all of which are useful recommendations in their own right but none of which deal with the inconsistent, ad hocapproach to speed limits in housing estates. Jake's law, the Road Traffic (Amendment) Bill 2015, remedies that gap in the law and provides a mandatory statutory speed limit applicable to all housing estates. That is the way to resolve this matter of speed limits.

The Government will not oppose the Bill's passage to Committee Stage. When the Minister responds, I ask him to set out when he envisages the Committee Stage debate will take place. I ask him to set out when he envisages that Jake's law will become the law of the land. I ask him to set out and to guarantee that this legislation will be afforded the level of urgency it deserves. It would be most disingenuous and unacceptable of the Government to act as it has with other legislative items, that is, to allow it to proceed to Committee Stage only to be left there to gather dust. The Minister should be clear that he will not get away with that tactic when it comes to Jake's law as his family and his mammy in particular will not let him away with it. If the Minister seeks a measure of their determination and in particular that of Roseann, he should look to the vigil they have mounted at the gates of Leinster House in recent days. Jake's family has been there since lunchtime on Sunday and will sleep out there again tonight. They have told me they would sooner sleep outside the Dáil from now until next Christmas than let this matter go. I believe them and the Minister should believe them as well.

On Sunday, when the vigil gathered, another woman named Rita Malone from County Clare came to support Jake's law and the Brennan family at the gates of Leinster House. Rita told her story in which her boy Oran, aged eight, was hit and badly injured in the housing estate in which his childminder lived. Rita recalled hearing Rosie on the radio talking about Jake some months earlier and told me that when she heard Rosie tell her story, she had been obliged to pull into the side of the road to compose herself because she was so upset to hear of what happened to that six year old child.

She told me that when she listened to Roseann on that occasion, she could never have imagined that she, a few months later, would find herself in a similar situation in that her own child would be hit and injured in an accident almost identical to Jake’s. Yet, that is exactly what happened. The most heart-breaking similarity between the two stories is that Rita Malone told me that, as Oran lay on the ground, injured, waiting for attention, he asked his mammy would he die. She tells of the fear she saw in the child’s face. Roseann tells exactly the same story.

The Minister, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, and I share a constituency, living no more than a stone’s throw from each other. Both of us represent a constituency where we know the consequences and the fallout of children being injured or dying in road traffic accidents. He will recall in 2007 we lost young Pádraig McGillivray in Cabra and in 2011 young Conor Hickey. Being a family man himself, the Minister knows the consequences for the families affected and for the community at large.

This law asks us as public representatives to simply remedy an obvious gap in the law. The legislation is straightforward, setting a new 20 km/h speed limit, making it binding and mandatory to ensure there is no opting in or opting out. It gives that level of universality, sureness and cover across all housing estates. The Minister, as a reasonable person, cannot turn down such a proposition. He knows leaving this matter to the discretion of local authorities has simply not cut the mustard. Above all, I know he appreciates the real suffering and hardship that Jake’s family has been through, as have many other families across the State.

We have an opportunity in this simple and straightforward legislation to resolve a dilemma and a problem. That does not always happen in political life. Very often dilemmas and problems are profoundly complex, requiring endless consideration, weighing and balancing, as well as deliberation. This is not one of those cases. This is a straightforward request to create clarity, uniformity and safety through a 20 km/h speed limit in housing estates. It means slow traffic into and out of public and private housing estates. It will require more than the €2 million earmarked by the Minister. However, the safety of our children deserves and requires nothing less.

The family of Jake Brennan is sitting behind the Minister in the Public Gallery. He cannot see them but they are looking down at him now. There is an expectation among that family, on behalf of all of the children injured or who lost their lives in circumstances similar to those of Jake's, that the Government will take the honourable, sensible and competent action on this matter. The honourable action is not to oppose this legislation in the hope it might go away but to actively support it, setting out when it will go to Committee Stage and a timeline for its passage.

May I suggest 12 June next as the date to have this law on the Statute Book, marking the first anniversary of Jake’s death. It would be a symbol for all those children injured and for all those families who have lost children in road traffic accidents. That would be an appropriate timeline to set for this legislation. In a spirit of co-operation, decency and concern for the safety of children, so many of whom live in housing estates, I hope the Minister will embrace this legislation and keep the commitment and pledge he made to Roseann Brennan and to Jake’s legacy. I hope he will not alone allow the passage of this legislation but that he becomes its champion. I hope he, along with the rest of us, does justice to the legacy and the memory of young Jake Brennan and the reality of his family’s life, as well as every child injured on our roads. In passing this legislation, we must resolve collectively that we will do everything in our power to ensure these incidents do not occur again.

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