Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I relayed this personal story to the Minister of State in the past. My family, like thousands of families, has been impacted by tragedy on our roads in the years and decades gone by. I never knew my grandfather on my mother's side. He was killed when cycling on Mulgrave Street in Limerick before I was born. I wish I had known him. He was by all accounts a good and impressive man. Thousands of families have suffered this kind of bereavement and continue to do so and we need to put a stop to it.

I commend the Minister of State. He is showing real leadership in this area under his remit. I encourage him to leave a legacy in this area because he will be remembered for it if he can solve this awful problem we have with respect to safety on our roads. There is a lot to think about. I did not have a slot for this session so I thank the Ceann Comhairle for allowing me to speak. A number of issues come to mind that we have to tackle if we are to address the carnage that is happening on our roads. In recent years, the size of motor vehicles has increased drastically. As a Government and an Oireachtas, we need to grapple with this. The people who purchase these vehicles often do so because they perceive them to be safer and, in some cases, they are safer for those in the vehicles, but for the most part, they are not safer for those who are outside. There are blind spots.

They are bigger and heavier vehicles that drive more smoothly than cars did previously. You can drive faster and not feel like you are going as fast in these vehicles. We need to address that trend towards bigger and heavier vehicles. If we compare photographs of any street in any village, town or city in Ireland with those from a number of decades ago, we can see the sheer difference in the sizes of vehicles between then and now. That is something we must address because it really is impacting safety. It is not necessarily, of course, in the Minister of State's gift to address that. A whole-of-government approach is needed to do so.

There is a culture of impunity on our roads. If you stand at any set of traffic lights or controlled junction in the country, as the lights turn from amber to red, you will see three, four and sometimes five cars race through at any time. It is the easiest thing to prove. That culture of impunity is real and needs to be addressed in my view with red light cameras. There needs to be a visible presence of gardaí in our towns and cities to catch people. I remember 30 years ago hearing of somebody being caught for driving through a red light. I have not heard of somebody being caught and fined for driving through a red light at all since then. That is testament to how seriously we are taking the issue of breaking red lights. It starts with breaking red lights. If we are not addressing those simple things, then we are not going to address other things like speeding. We have rules for a reason, and we are not enforcing them and penalising those people who are breaking the rules, whether it is breaking red lights or parking on footpaths or in bus lanes and cycleways. These are the small things that actually need to be addressed because they feed into the culture of impunity that-----

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