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

The roads policing unit the Minister of State is talking about has had its numbers cut consecutively every year for the past ten years. Bringing in new laws to reduce speed is welcome and appropriate on many roads. There is no problem with that; nobody is saying otherwise. Nobody is disagreeing with the Minister of State there. The problem is that on most roads there are no gardaí to enforce the limits. That is the reality around most parts of the country. The Minister of State knows that as well as I do. People see all of this being rolled out by the Government. The Minister of State had a previous proposal to have different levels of penalty points for weekdays rather than weekends and had to withdraw it. I said at the time that it was not going to work and that we needed to have prelegislative scrutiny but the Minister of State refused to do that. It was clear to me and to any logical person that we cannot have one law for one day of the week and a different law for another. The Minister of State had to pull back from that. Now he is telling us that the measures he is putting in place are going to work. We do not see the investment. We do not see the numbers in roads policing being put in place to do that.

We also have a huge problem in the country of accident blackspots on very dangerous bends, dangerous corners and difficult situations that need to be resolved. Local authorities are looking for funding and they are continually banging their heads off a brick wall and not getting adequate funding to deliver them. We have pinch points in many areas of the country where these accidents continue to happen, yet the Government continues to ignore it.

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