Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Road Safety Authority does much good work but it is all too powerful and has too much of a say. I had an issue with the regulations around the laden weight of a three-axle vehicle which the Minister addressed with the stroke of a pen.

Countless Ministers have refused to sign this statutory instrument for 13 years. The current Minister signed it - perhaps not knowing about the consequences or perhaps he wanted to sign it - and it did huge damage to the rural hauliers. They were trying to haul milk, corn, grain or whatever. The axle was vital. It was put down and held. They had to handle the cost of that. Many had to get rid of their lorries, which they had only bought new. That had a huge impact. There was no impact assessment or rural-proofing of the legislation. These trucks can travel on the motorways all they like but not on rural roads. I know the argument is made that rural roads are damaged by the weight of these lorries but the more axles they have, the less damage will be done. The Minister signed that statutory instrument.

I commend the Minister on the recent matter of tractors travelling above a speed of 40 km/h. Again, the Road Safety Authority was involved in this regard. The relevant instrument was signed in the middle of the consultation. There was consultation with the Irish Farmers Association, IFA, the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association, ICMSA, and other organisations and indeed the Association of Farm Contractors Ireland. They were all coming to a follow-on consultation meeting in Kildare one afternoon and discovered when they arrived that the Minister had signed the statutory instrument. I brought this to the Minister's attention and, to his credit, he said that the matter would have to be renegotiated because it would have a huge impact. The farcical part about it was that tractors travelling at 40 km/h or above were going to be put off the road. Such vehicles could not travel at just 15 km/h. Where I live, one could not get from Dungarvan to the mart or to Castlemartyr. If one got a tractor that was 20 years old and had the lowest box, it could be very defective but one could drive at 100 mph if one liked. This is the kind of crazy thinking that goes on in the Road Safety Authority.

I know a wonderful young man, Jason Maher, from Cahir in County Tipperary, who is a good entrepreneur with a great brain. The Minister spoke to him. Mr. Maher is passionate about a tyre application. Half the cars in the country, unknown to us, have tyres that are below the approved grip level. Many of the tyres on vehicles in the car park outside the House might be below the approved grip. How are we supposed to know? This young man when to great expense and offered great expertise and advice and the Minister's Department organised a meeting with the head of the Road Safety Authority. He closed his premises early one Sunday night, drove to Sligo and stayed at a bed and breakfast establishment in order to be at the meeting with the boss of the Road Safety Authority. He turned up but the man from the authority never did. That is the contempt the authority has for new initiatives on road safety. This tyre application would inform a register and people would get a text when the tyres on their vehicles had a certain amount of miles done or were unsafe. In this inclement weather, one needs good new tyres. This is the kind of contempt the Road Safety Authority shows. It has too much power and is not policing where it should be policing. I am saying that honestly and fairly.

I have a certain amount of contempt for many of these quangos. We had the National Roads Authority, NRA. One could not talk to it. We have experience of being on county councils where we want to get a sign moved or something else done on a national or primary road. I have said many times that we had a peace process. The late Alec Reid and a former colleague here, Martin Mansergh, were a great assistance with it. We got rid of the IRA and we got the NRA. That was fearful. Thank God the authority is not into violent acts but it is destroying economies and not listening to anybody. The young man to whom I refer travelled to Sligo with his initiative and had to go home again because a person did not bother to go and meet him. That is where matters stand. His application was excellent. We have many issues with our roads besides what we are talking about and that tyre application is one solution.

I want to salute An Garda Síochána regarding its work in Tipperary, Dublin and throughout the country and in Dublin. In particular, I salute the traffic corps. The numbers in the corps have sadly been diminished despite the work it has done. We are spending a fortune on Gatso vans, the speed vans that we have, the operators of which have refused my request to the Minister's Department and from county councils to come to places in Dublin and Tipperary where multiple fatalities have taken place in order to try to do something with the traffic there and to test people if they are driving at reckless speeds. They will not do so and instead want to go to places where they make money. This is a money-making racket. I want that crowd to be disbanded and the money to be put into the traffic corps. Augment the traffic corps, give it a larger fleet and more members. In a reply to parliamentary questions I tabled in 2016, I found that the State had paid almost €88 million to private speed cameras firms and collected just €32.7 million from motorists' fines. That represents many people being caught and fined. It is a trick, really. One could be travelling in a place with an 80 km/h limit, which suddenly drops to 60 km/h and then, almost immediately, to 50 km/h. I do not drive fast. I am not saying that I never broke the speed limit but I do not drive fast. Any of us could get caught in an area where the limit suddenly drops to 50 km/h. There are places where there are three different speed limits in 200 yds or less. A total of €88 million was paid out for a return of €32 million. That is not very profitable, although the quango does all right.

I am questioning the costs of operating the Garda safety camera contract because each year from 2012 to 2015 it cost the State over €17 million to maintain that contract. These are the kinds of lucrative contracts we have signed up to, such as the toll bridges. There is no cop on. Many of us here are in business and if we signed any kind of contract such as that, we would quickly be out of business. The waste is shameful and outrageous. We will go home to talk to people tomorrow evening. I resent the fact that this Bill is down to be debated tomorrow, Thursday, evening for three and a half hours. Those of us from rural Ireland, whether north, south, east, or west, all know that if one is not out of this city by 3 p.m., one should forget about it until 7 p.m. since this is where all the logjams occur. One can get jammed in not too far away from here because there is an attempt to widen a motorway which was designed incorrectly 25 years ago and which does not have a sufficient number of intersections. Where is the accountability for that and the millions that were spent? What about the money coming in from National Toll Roads Limited and where is it going? Is it being ploughed back into the system? It is not. It is all privatised in shameful deals. We have regulators for this, that and the other.

In the last three years here, we could not walk for all the investment. The new Luas is open now and I notice the Minister did not get the opportunity to open it. Our €5 million whizz-kid, the Taoiseach, took the job of announcing that one day with his PR machine. It was €6 million or €5 million. I am not anti-Dublin at all but in the context of investment in Dublin, anything goes. Only three transport infrastructural projects were announced in the most recent budget and they were all in Dublin. One goes a little into Kildare but it would not be any good to the Ceann Comhairle going home because it does not go that far. It is all Dublin-centric. We are doing this to the detriment of rural Ireland. I have travelled on the Luas, with all its investments, and it is a great system, but then we got congestion and bedlam and nobody could go anywhere. The Taoiseach and his entourage were caught up in it. These people are not the experts that they think they are at all.

The Minister has done nothing to deal with the emissions targets. I will not say what I was going to say, but he has done nothing. There is an insurance scandal and the Minister has a bee in his bonnet. The last men who had that were the former Minister, Noel Dempsey, and Gay Byrne. They were going to lock up every learner driver, or their parents, if they were caught alone on the road. I have to be honest and say that some learner drivers I knew travelled unaccompanied. I am all for putting a penalty on it, putting a speed restriction on them or dealing with some of these absolutely awful drivers. How are people going to educate their children and send them to college? We cannot just drop them to the Luas, the DART or a bus station. We do not have those in rural Ireland. How are young people going to travel to work? We are trying to regrow our economy and restart it, and to educate our young people. How are they going to get to work? They have to have a car. I bought a car for €1,500 for my 17 year old last August. He is 18 now and the car is parked up. I got a lovely car, formerly owned by a lady driver, but I could not get insurance since it was €4,800. Where is one going to go? There is a racket and scandal going on in insurance, such as the Minister was able to write over the decades. I admire much of what he put in his columns over the decades - he could do everything. I support the Minister's legislation on judges and what he was doing with the Judiciary, but we expected so much from him. The people of rural Ireland have been badly let down.

In saying that, I want to thank the Minister for coming down to projects in Tipperary and trying to help out with issues-----

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