Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is appropriate to recognise that last night there was another tragic death in Sligo, when a man on an e-scooter was killed. That brings the number of deaths on the roads this year to 155, which is the same number that we had for the entirety of last year. This is the tragedy that keeps coming at us. Every weekend or every couple of days, we hear of more people being killed on the roads. It is a terrible tragedy for those families, and for people who are injured and for a whole community that is left to grieve afterwards.

We all recognise and understand what needs to happen. We need to have safer roads for people to travel on and we need people to travel more safely on those roads as well. This will involve a range of actions.

I appreciate that the Minister of State is bringing forward legislation. There are three aspects to that and he outlined them. Speed, the Minister of State correctly said, is recognised as one of the main contributing factors to road accidents. Often that speed is a result of intoxication. People drive too fast when they have alcohol or other substances on board. This can have detrimental consequences for them and their families. I welcome the idea of having mandatory drug testing at the scenes of accidents. Indeed, drug testing is something we need to see rolled out more across the country in general when it comes to checks that gardaí are doing at checkpoints.

We need to recognise that there are many roads on which the current speed limit of 80 km/h is far too high. That is the reality for many quite country roads. Having said that, there are stretches of those roads where it is appropriate to have it at that limit. That is where, I suppose, we need to ensure, as, in fairness, the Minister of State has acknowledged, that the local authorities will have, hopefully, in conjunction with the Garda Síochána, a substantial role in ensuring that they have got the flexibility to have an appropriate limit on the piece of road we were talking about in order that the law that we bring into force will be a law that citizens will abide by. If we bring in laws which people feel are ridiculous or inappropriate, they simply will not abide by them. That will make it more difficult for An Garda Síochána to enforce such laws.

Of course, much of what we do here will be about enforcement. Enforcement and deterrence are the big issues. The problem is that in the past number of years we have seen a significant depletion in Garda numbers across the board, but particularly in the area of roads policing. Almost one third of the gardaí who were policing our roads in the past are not there anymore. The impact of that is to be seen everywhere. It is to be seen in the number of people who are being prosecuted, the number of people who have been caught, etc. What has happened is that the gardaí who have been removed from roads policing have been replaced by GoSafe vans. While they have a role to play, they are not playing the one they should be playing. We need to see more gardaí there carrying out those efforts.

In regard to the prospect of bringing in penalty points at a higher rate for bank holiday weekends as opposed to other times, I get the logic. The Minister of State explained that clearly yesterday at the committee. I understand where he is coming from in that regard. He cited Australia, where it worked previously. However, that is one jurisdiction where we see this happening. We should be careful about that. I would be wary about the suggestion that a person who speeds or who uses the roads in an inappropriate manner and breaks the law on a Thursday or a Friday is, somehow or other, less culpable than he or she would be at weekends. That is the problem I have with it. The law should apply across the board. This is a dangerous road to go down, if the Minister of State will pardon the pun. We need to consider matters carefully before we go down that road. I appreciate that the Minister of State wants to move this at pace and introduce these measures quickly. That is fine, but we also have to be responsible and recognise that sometimes there can be unintended consequences to legislation that we bring in with too much haste. We would want to be careful that this does not happen in the context of the forthcoming Bill.

The other issue I want to raise with the Minister of State relates to the actual quality of our roads. In my constituency, we have the N17. As I am sure the Deputies all will be aware, there was a great song written about it. There is a section of the road that is very dangerous and that requires an upgrade. In the past couple of months, the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, visited Sligo and told us that there would be no upgrade works done to the N17 and that the new road was not to be built. It had basically been shelved to the great disappointment not only to the people of that area but to the motoring public in general, because many people use that road and recognise how dangerous it is, and that that new road needs to be built. Government commitments in respect of roads of that nature need to be honoured. We need safe roads, because they are not only for people who travel in cars, heavy goods vehicles or, as we try to roll out more public transport, particularly in rural areas, buses, but we also need quality roads on which people can drive.

I also want to raise with the Minister of State the issue of the A5 upgrade. This road goes through the other jurisdiction, the North. There has been a commitment from Government in respect of it in the past. I would like to hear the Minister of State restate the commitment that the Government will fund that road on a 50-50 basis. Hopefully, we can move that forward. It really needs to move forward because the numbers of people that are being killed, particularly in County Tyrone but on other parts of that road, are much higher than on other sections of it. The Government commitment needs to be honoured, and we need to keep the pressure on to ensure that that new road is built.

The statistics on people losing their lives on the roads indicate that 53 out of the 155 who lost their lives so far this year were the drivers of the vehicles involved. In addition, 38 pedestrians, 32 passengers, 22 motorcyclists, five cyclists and four e-scooter riders were killed.

I presume that the statistic the Minister of State referred to in the context of people not wearing seat-belts relates, in most cases, to passengers, and usually those in the back seat. I have very seldom seen anyone getting into a car and driving without his or her seat-belt on. Nor have I seen many front-seat passengers do so. I imagine this issue relates to back-seat passengers. Perhaps the Minister of State can clarify the position. We have a culture where most people wear their seat-belts but there are a minority of individuals who possibly do not. As stated, these people may be back-seat passengers. When we look at the statistics, we can see that 32 of the 155 people killed were passengers in cars. Perhaps that is where that is coming from.

Speed is one of the key factors here, but there are other things that happen at the same time. There are people out there who, when they get behind the wheel of a car, think they are at the Monte Carlo Rally no matter where they are going. They speed. They drive erratically. They drive recklessly. We need to have measures to be able to ensure that those individuals are caught. They are in a minority. There are many people out there who abide by the rules of the road, who travel at appropriate speeds and who monitor weather conditions. They do everything properly but there are a minority who do not. We need to have proper mechanisms in place to ensure that those people are caught and that they are properly dealt with.

That brings me back to penalty points and the adequate fines that can be put in place. The existing system of fines is the same across the board. Someone pointed out to me that if a celebrity who has a big fast car gets caught speeding, the fine will not matter to him or her because he or she has the money to pay it. For many other people, the fine is an issue because money is a big issue in their lives and they do not have spare cash to be paying fines for speeding or for any other traffic offences. In other jurisdictions, the fines imposed relate to the person's income. That is something which could be considered. I ask the Minister of State whether he has considered this as a possibility.

The Minister of State mentioned the use of mobile phones. I spoke to someone last week who regularly drives a van in which the driver's seat is quite high up. Often this person would glance down when passing cars. This man told me that on his way to Dublin a couple of weeks ago he counted five people who were driving with their knees on the steering wheel as they were text messaging. I do not know how we can deal with that. How can anyone stop people from doing that? How can we monitor them? We do not have technology to be able to do that. It is down to the person involved having enough cop-on to realise that what he or she is doing is extremely dangerous, both for himself or herself and for others. A person may have hands-free and answer a phone, and speak on it while he or she is driving. That is one thing, but to be trying to text while driving is beyond belief. According to the man in question, it is not only the odd person who is doing it; it is something that he sees on a regular basis.

We need to have a suite of measures to be able to deal with road safety. Some of the measures the Minister of State is bringing in are appropriate and need to happen. We need to be looking at other measures. We need to look at the use of technology more. We need to look at the static cameras. The Minister of State mentioned that. Possibly, we need to be looking at speed-limiters in cars. We need to be looking at ways in which we can deter people from abusing the rules of the road and make sure that there are adequate sanctions in place when they do that, but we also need to educate people and train young drivers better when it comes to using the roads, particularly motorways.

What the Minister of State is trying to do is laudable. We support it and want it to happen, but we do not want to see stuff brought in that we will later regret and that will have unintended consequences. This is why it is very appropriate that we have a full and comprehensive debate on all of these issues.

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