Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Having listened carefully to the debate tonight and before Christmas, I am a little concerned about some of the comments on the Bill and the tone and attitude displayed in some of the contributions towards people who raise concerns about the measures in it. It is becoming an increasingly common feature of society that people who raise concerns and ask for more reasoned dialogue are vilified as outliers, pariahs and filibusterers who are responsible for killing people on our roads and so forth. That is not helpful because no Member is in favour of making the roads less safe or jeopardising anyone's life.

I understand and fully support the desire and efforts to make our roads safer - I genuinely believe everyone does. I accept the point that even one death on the road is one death too many. However, that does not mean I do not have the right to raise concerns about the legislation or to question its effectiveness, and I do question it. I do not believe that tone is helpful. It is something that we should examine as a society. If a person is against criminalising the purchase of sex, suddenly that person is in favour of exploiting women. If a person supports the call to end the sanctions on Syria, somehow that makes the person a supporter of Bashar al Assad. If a person raises questions about this legislation, she is irresponsible, a gombeen and a pariah and is jeopardising people's lives. That is not on. I do not believe that is healthy or that it is a good way of debating issues. We should be more adult about it, as it were.

I have listened to much of the debate. I still do not know what I think about it. However, some valid points have been raised to question the effectiveness of the proposal, especially in the context of other major issues where road safety and lives are being put at risk.

Let us deal with some of those points. Deputy Ó Broin made the point that we know this legislation will save some lives. I do not know that is the case and I have not seen the evidence in that regard. We are talking about increasing the punishment at the lower level of alcohol consumption. How do we know that will save lives? It may or may not. That is what we are doing. To me, it is not seriously effective. When we cut back the padding, essentially we are creating a new category of disqualification for drink-driving. That is it in a nutshell against a backdrop of major other issues that need to be addressed.

At present, if an experienced driver has more than 80 mg but less than 100 mg per 100 ml of blood, the person will be disqualified for six months under the administrative system. If the person goes to court for the offence, she will face a year of disqualification. By contrast, an experienced driver with a blood alcohol content of more than 100 mg but less than 150 mg who goes to court will face a two-year ban. The Bill creates a new category for disqualification at lower levels of blood alcohol content. This affects an experienced driver with between 50 mg and 80 mg per 100 ml of blood. Such a person will be disqualified for three months under the administrative process as against the current penalty of three penalty points.

I am in two minds. I have listened to the debate. I was particularly struck by the contribution of Deputy Ó Cuív and the points he made around the issue of proportionality. I believe they were important. He made the point that the Bill, if enacted, will have a major and disproportionate effect on those living in Ireland without any access to public transport. Tens of thousands of people have been left to rely on their cars because of generations of abysmal spatial planning, turning a blind eye to one-off houses everywhere and our consistent failure to invest in public transport.

Let us suppose a person in rural Ireland falls foul of this legislation and ends up losing a licence for three months. That person will have to get a taxi to work, if there are even taxis in the area. If the children have to be brought to school, the person is going to have to get taxis to bring them to school, depending on work patterns. This is happening against a backdrop where the Government has viciously cut back on school transport services over recent years. It is something that affects people in rural areas in my constituency and in general. It is an issue I am contacted about frequently. If someone cannot drive and there is no service from the State to pick up the slack and help people to get their children to school, then we have a problem.

Let us suppose a person in Dublin runs up against the legislation and is disqualified. That person can get the bus, train or Luas for three months and it would not be the end of the world. Obviously, it would be a slight inconvenience but it is not really a big deal for such people. For me, that is incredibly unfair. There is a basis to Deputies raising concerns about this.

If there is to be a sanction, then it should apply to all equally rather than penalise some groups more than others. The impact of the penalty because of all the other issues means we are disproportionately impacting one group of people rather than others. In some ways it is a little like the argument for linking fines to income. A €120 clamp-removal fee is nothing to someone earning €100,000 but a great deal for someone on the minimum wage. By not linking fines to income, we are setting up a situation whereby there is one law for the poor and another for the rich. The poor are forced to abide by the law while the rich can do what they like and soak up the sanction. This Bill is a little like that. We are creating a heavy sanction for those in rural areas and a lighter one for those in cities. That is simply a point of fact. It is not right, but it is a consequence of other Government policies.

One could make the argument that all a person has to do is not have a drink at all. If that is the case, we should outlaw the use of alcohol at all levels. Why do we have a discriminatory impact? What if we said there should not be different categories or that we would disqualify anyone even for a small level of alcohol? The reason there are different levels is that there are differences. I believe most adults accept that there is a difference. There is a difference between drunk driving and someone who goes out once a week to collect the pension in a rural area and have a pint and who then drives home on the same rural road that she always drives on. That is part of the way of overcoming isolation and so on. There is a major difference between the person who maybe had had a pint or two all her life and people who go out and have ten pints and then get behind a car when they cannot even put the key in. We have different categories in the first place to recognise that situation. It is going to have a serious impact.

There is an irony or hypocrisy in this. The statistics tell us that if we want to deal with road deaths and appalling tragedies – I fully accept that we all do – then we should start with the main things that cause it. Speeding is a far bigger cause or killer than drink driving, especially in this era. Young people are far better educated now about the negative impact of drink driving. Fewer young people drink drive now than they did in the years when I was growing up. It is frowned upon by society. Already we have created a climate whereby most people accept that it is unacceptable to drive while drunk. It is absolutely frowned upon. I do not think we have reached the same place in terms of speeding, yet speeding has a far bigger impact.

Many of the young men who love their cars do not drink because they are saving money to spend on the car, yet they go out speeding. We need to educate people in that regard. There should be mandatory classes in all schools on road safety, how to use cars and so on.

Another point relates to mobile telephones. I believe it could be scientifically shown in the case of most people, regardless of their physiological composition, that trying to use a mobile telephone while driving is far more dangerous than someone driving after one drink. Using the telephone necessitates the user taking her eye off the road. There is recognition of this point in our legislation now in the context of the different gradings. Again I come back to the point. It is terrible that we have to do it. No doubt when one raises any question, the viewpoint is going to be distorted and somehow portrayed as condoning drunk driving. It comes back to the point that we are talking about changing the penalty at the low level of alcohol in the blood. What we should be doing is dealing with deterrent. It should be a question of how we deter people rather than how we punish people. I do not accept that a punishment of this character is necessarily a deterrent and I have not seen evidence to support that view.

One thing has struck me as ironic. We have so little time and resources in the House to move legislation.

All the emphasis is being put on this as a catch-all but I do not see it. We already have rules in place and there is a bitter irony that, while we are having this discussion and putting it forward as a solution to the problems, we also know what has happened in this State in the recent period. I refer to 2 million phantom breath tests and widespread phantom mandatory alcohol test checkpoints. We have legislation but gardaí mismanaged it by fraudulently returning figures and stating they held checkpoints when that was not the case. Why did that happen? It happened, in part, as a result of the reduction in Garda numbers and traffic corps numbers have been depleted recently. They remain depleted by comparison with what they should be and if we really want safety on our roads, we can help it not so much by changing legislation as by having real checkpoints carrying out real breath tests on people who try to break the law. It would have a greater deterrent impact than any piece of paper on the subject and I am at a loss as to why we have not pushed this forward.

It is not just an issue for rural Ireland, even though there is a big impact there. There are parts of Dublin and other cities where there is a chronic dearth of public transport. It would be remiss of me not to mention my own constituency, where Swords is incredibly poorly served by public transport, despite having a population of over 45,000 and being bigger than Drogheda. Instead, it relies on a private bus service and a Dublin bus service that comes nowhere near to delivering to our population. We hear a lot of talk about metro north, which has been going on for years and years, but nothing has happened. One would find it very difficult to get around if one lived in Fingal without a car. Given the size of the population, this state of affairs is genuinely mind-boggling. People in both rural and urban areas deserve the choice of getting public transport to wherever they want to go but, instead of moving with the times and increasing public transport provision, we are facing massive fines for missing our emissions targets and the Government is coming up with hare-brained bus routes which are put out to tender for private companies, something the dogs on the streets could say will not properly service the areas in question but will simply force more people back into their cars. This just creates a vicious circle.

I am in two minds about this Bill and I do not know how I view it. I know for sure, however, that it is not the solution to the problems on our roads. I am highly sceptical that it will make even a bit of a difference. Deputy Ó Broin said it might save one life but I am not sure it will even do that. The Bill deals with a lower level of alcohol against a backdrop in which there is no enforcement. If there is no enforcement, the most vicious and penalising policy will not make a blind bit of difference.

Deputy Ó Cuív made the excellent point that the Bill disproportionately punishes people who are already suffering the effects of terrible Government policy in the shape of a lack of investment in public transport and the gutting of many rural areas, with the social and mental health problems that go with that. In terms of proportionality, this is poor legislation. We all want to put an end to drink-driving deaths but I have not heard sufficient argument to convince me this is the best or fairest way to achieve that goal. I do not think it takes enough of an overview of modern Irish society and the increasing prevalence, for example, of drug use. If we were really serious about these issues we would deal with them from the point of view of planning, public transport, investment on our roads, and our education system to provide a deterrent and awareness. Critically, we would approach it from the point of view of enforcement of the legislation already there.

I look forward to hearing the rest of the debate because, with my hand on my heart, I cannot say what way I feel about the Bill at the moment.

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