Kevin O'Keeffe (Cork East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The last time I spoke on this Bill was on 8 December 2017. That night, one of the oldest rural pubs in north Cork, the Function Bar, closed. That bar made its living out of people who drove to the pub and had a couple of drinks. They did not pass any other pub. These people have since been left in rural isolation. They are the older generation, not the young generation.

I speak tonight on the original Bill. I will not make any comments on the amendments being brought forward, even though the Bill has been turned into a cocktail for the want of a better word. The Minister is the man who came out with a knee-jerk reaction over a year and a half ago when there were many tragedies and road fatalities. I accept there were but the Minister decided to go after the social drinkers and take them out of the equation. There was no thought whatsoever. The Minister took the soft option.

The Minister is attacking us as filibustering. We are not. He has had the legislation and the paperwork in his Department for a year and half now. It typifies the Minister. He is being inactive in his Department. He has failed to get work done. As he said at the recent Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport, he does not get involved in direct activity in his Department. I refer to his comments in respect to the sports capital grant applications. He said that he threw any letter he got from politicians with representations into the bin. By God, he is probably right because that is the way it worked out. Luckily, those people who made applications in my area made good applications and were successful.

The Minister is inactive. I say that strongly. There have been many other issues in his Department where he has been found to be hands-off, such as when the road hauliers looked for a derogation on the axle issue. The big issue was Ireland's Rugby World Cup bid and getting us onto the playing field. He made no attempt at all to get us a few votes across the water. The only place he succeeded was in England. He could not even sway the Scottish. The Minister got away with murder on that issue. A year and half year later, he is deriding us. Before I go any further, I want to say that I am not a terrorist. I read his recent comments in my newspaper, the Irish Examiner. If it is guilt by association, I will be known as a terrorist on the road. I am not a terrorist. I do not condone drunk-driving or excessive drink-driving. I want to emphasis that. The Minister is taking the heart out of rural Ireland. He could be taking the heart out of leafy Dublin or taking the heart out of suburban towns where they have no pubs within three quarters of a mile of the town centre where there are leafy suburbs. He is taking no consideration of that fact.

As I said to the Minister, he is the man who is doing the filibustering. If he was any good, he would have come here 12 months ago with proper legislation to allow us to debate it accurately on the main point. The Minister allowed people to come in with the 1.5 m rule for cyclists and the regulations for pedestrians to wear hoods and so on. I agreed with those but this legislation is different. It is unrelated and it deflects from what we are talking about tonight.

The Minister has had the proposal for over a year. Did the Minister look at any of the other issues when he reacted to this proposal on drink driving? Did he look at the issue of roads and the safety of junctions and so on? Many other issues and factors cause crashes. The Minister is the man with the cheque book. He is the man who can help rural Ireland and towns. He can help to alleviate the occurrence of crashes. The Minister can close his eyes, but I am disappointed that he has found this one point in his portfolio as Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport to attack rural Ireland.

I have considered what the Minister is doing at the moment. The Minister has responsibility for sport as well. We have sports organised by the GAA and up to recently there were red cards and yellow cards. If a player received a red card, he was gone. Let us imagine the red card is the response to getting a drunk driver off the road. A yellow card, which is what we are talking about at the moment, gives a person a second chance. What the Minister is trying to do is to bring in a black card. On the GAA playing fields, the team gets another player, an alternative - in other words, there is a substitute. However, in this case, the Minister is providing no alternative for an innocent person who inadvertently might be over the limit in the morning. The Minister has provided no alternative for transport, whether bus, taxi drivers or a second driver. That is the big issue here. The Minister is trying to turn a yellow card into a black card without any proper consideration for the damage he will cause.

Reference was made to mental health. The Minister should think of peoples' careers and the knock-on effects this will cause for those who are put off the road. I hope that those who lose their jobs in such situations do not go further beyond the mental health problem - I say as much sincerely.

Last August, when people like us were saying the legislation should not be changed, the Minister came out with some of his pressure groups and threw it at people that they were the cause of people being killed. That is incorrect. The Minister went on about drunk drivers and that category of people and that was unfair. If a Palestinian throws a little scud over the border into Israel, the Minister and his cohorts come back like the Israelis with bombers. That is what the Minister comes back to us like. In other words, there is no proper balanced argument on the issue. That is why I am speaking tonight.

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