John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his presence and for this Bill. I am old enough to remember that it was the late Séamus Brennan as Minister for Transport who introduced penalty points. He just got tired of people pussyfooting around the issue and putting obstacles in the way of bringing in something pragmatic. He went for it and introduced it. It had a dramatic impact on driver behaviour and, more importantly, road casualties.

I have become aware as a public representative, as no doubt the Minister of State and Ceann Comhairle have, that people want to be consulted on things. One of the things leading to fringe elements protesting is frustration among people who feel they are not consulted about anything. They wake up and see dramatic infrastructural and structural changes on their roads without input or say-so. When they lift the phone or send an email to find out who is responsible, they never get an answer. If the public was consulted on this issue, it would undoubtedly say police are not visible on our roads. Speed traps as we used to know them have all but disappeared and road traffic police have almost vanished from parts of the city. That is no fault of Garda members. It is just the numbers. We have to do better on that. I know the Minister of State is committed to that. When the Garda is equipped with this legislation, it will assist it in doing its job more effectively, but without a sufficient number of gardaí, these changes will be difficult to implement.

What do people want? Law-abiding drivers comply with the speed limits, rules of the road and directional signs but see others contravening all those things, never mind drink and drug driving, which we will come to. When the small things are penalised and dealt with by law enforcement, however, it gives those law-abiding drivers an awful lot of confidence. One thing that can assist us in this is cameras, which the Minister of State spoke about. We need more cameras in the city at junctions. That would save the police much time regarding the breaking of red or amber lights.

I am a cyclist and will be very popular for saying this. It is tempting as a cyclist to not obey the lights because you feel you are not as big a danger to someone as a car - and you are not - but the law applies to cyclists and pedestrians as much as to everybody else. We are a country of pedestrians too, many of whom pay little attention to pedestrian signals. When drivers break lights, do not obey road signs and get away with it, it leads to a creeping breaking of the law.

There is a super cycle track under construction in Tallaght. A man recently came to me and said he could not now drive his vehicle, which was legal, licensed and taxed, along this road without impeding the centre white line. He said he had been stopped for impeding the centre white line but his vehicle cannot travel along the lane because it has been narrowed so much. Local authorities in Knocklyon were recently asked to put traffic calming in a particular estate. They came back and said they would put ramps in. They put chicanes in. No one asked for them and no one was consulted about them going in but, in writing, South Dublin County Council said it was going to put in ramps.

One thing not in the Bill concerns residential speed limits in housing estates.

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