Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The key point, as the Minister of State said, is that we still have a very tragic figure in terms of the number of fatalities on road this year, which is 147. The figure may be lower than recent years, but an enormous amount of damage has been done, besides the fatalities themselves, to the families and connections of each and every person killed on our roads. We do not have a statistical basis to be able to measure the implementation of our laws. For example, one shocking statistic, on which I am still awaiting further clarification, is that 521 drivers were already disqualified between January 2013 and March 2015 at the time of conviction for involvement in a collision causing serious injury or death.

The Minister of State referred to the Road Safety Authority and its relationship with the Department, including the surrender of driving licences. The Minister of State said they are currently provided on a request-only basis to the Road Safety Authority, but the Department is working with the Road Safety Authority with a view to extending this monthly report to include statistics. The statistics on which the Department is working to move towards with the Road Safety Authority are the very statistics we want.

I have submitted a plethora of questions to the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, and the Minister, Deputy Fitzgerald, on the number of learner drivers paying fixed charge notices, information on the DPP's appeal against Judge Marie Keane's ruling, which I mentioned, the number of speeding offences and convictions, the number of drivers disqualified for drink-driving or dangerous driving, fixed notices for drivers parked in cycle lanes, disqualifications per District Court breakdown and so on. That is all information that is not to hand and does not appear in the statistics to which the Minister of State referred. The Minister, Deputy Donohoe, told me that since January 2013 a disqualified driver has been required to post his or her driving licence to the Road Safety Authority and the National Driver Licence Service in Cork city. I am informed that 96% of those disqualified simply do not do so.

Approximately a year ago, the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, told Ms Susan Gray of PARC on "Prime Time" that if he felt the postal system was not working he would take action and introduce legislation. Here we are, more than a year later, and nothing has happened. The nub of the debate tonight is that I believe the Road Safety Authority is up to date on every conceivable aspect of the statistics relating to road traffic offences, so we would not have to do a trawling, relentless search through the Courts Service's records. This is what we want, and it should be an ambition for, if not the outgoing Government, then certainly the new Government.

The recently announced proposals to introduce graduated fines for road traffic offences, perhaps ultimately based on a person's income, seems ludicrous. If the current system is not implemented in a clearly transparent way that is satisfactory to the House with up to date statistics, why would we introduce a much more complex system and introduce a double standard for people of different levels of wealth? It just does not make any sense. What we need is to have the current legislation which we passed in the House implemented fairly and squarely for every citizen and that we know the facts and the statistics.

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