Pa Daly (Kerry, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This is an important debate. We have reached a watershed moment. I commend my colleague Deputy Martin Kenny on his work in this area. I hope we will see action from the Government and the RSA soon. One of the interesting parliamentary questions submitted by Deputy Kenny was on the number of gardaí involved in roads policing. In 2017, there were 623 gardaí in roads policing according to the reply to that parliamentary question. Seven years later, there were 627, meaning there was only an increase of four gardaí involved despite massive increases in population and the number of cars on the roads. As with crime in the community, visibility, as has been said previously, is greatly important. Just as we need more gardaí and Garda Reserve members on our streets so people and communities can feel safe and to eliminate crime and the causes of crime, as well as the fear of crime, we also need more gardaí on our streets at all times of the day.

I echo what Deputy Kenny said. I, too, have spoken to many gardaí and 99% of gardaí on regular duty doing 12-hour shifts are doing half an hour of road traffic work on their shifts. In my experience in courts over the years, there is inevitably a mix of roads traffic policing for drink and drug driving. It is the gardaí who are on the streets late at night when people are coming out of the pubs and driving home who are the ones detecting offenders and bringing them to court.

An overall package is needed, but when we have a county like Clare that has not seen a new garda brought into the area in the last two years and the example of County Kerry, where the number of gardaí is down by 20 since before Covid struck, we are going to have a serious problem. Allied to this, we have the cuts in funding to TII. Engineers in Kerry County Council prepared detailed tender documents for contractors in relation to two roads. One concerns a bad bend near the school and bridge in Glenbeigh and the other is the N86 from Tralee to Dingle, between Annascaul and Lispole, and Baile an Chláir and Baile na Saor. Considerable work was put into that but for some strange reason, inexplicably, the funding has been cut. There is a suspicion that the money has gone to other countries, which is welcome, but these dangerous bends need to be eliminated. When so much work has gone into projects like these, it is very important that they are done.

Unfortunately, in many of the large developments built in urban areas, cycle lanes have not been put in place. To give one example, in Caherslee in Tralee, 34 road traffic offences have been detected in recent years. Of these 14 were road traffic collisions at the junctions of Glencairn and Lioscarrig with Caherslee Road. While none of them were serious or fatal, there are other road traffic offences and a road safety issue there and action needs to be taken in this regard.

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