Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to second this important motion on behalf of Labour and to thank my colleague, Deputy Duncan Smith, for tabling it.

Throughout history, there have been everyday tragedies that were once thought an inevitability. In the days before it was eradicated, it was thought that smallpox would forever take the lives of young people across the world. Most tragically, gun violence is thought of as an occupational hazard for small children heading to school in certain parts of the world today. What unites these seemingly hopeless problems is that there are solutions, as there was to the Covid pandemic. When implemented, these solutions have saved lives and certain tragedies are now not seen as inevitable in Ireland.

When a form of violence, a senseless tragedy or a major cause of death and injury is eliminated, we might reflect on how those states of affairs were ever allowed to continue. I hope and believe that, one day, we will talk about the tragedy of road deaths in the same way, namely, as something that we once tolerated, even assumed would continue, before we took the necessary action to stop it. I hope that our children will not believe that people once got killed or injured every day on Irish roads due to dangerous driver behaviour, bad planning, unsafe roads and poor maintenance. They will not believe that, on average, news bulletins reported a new road death - a new human tragedy - every other day. Indeed, our children already express shock when we tell them the amount of alcohol that motorists were once permitted to consume and how that was tolerated in our culture. In 1969, the then State Pathologist, Dr. Maurice Hickey, described that new stricter limits would render an 11-stone man over the limit after 2.75 pints or four whiskeys. "That is if he drank them quickly”, he said. Driver behaviour and our tolerance of behaviour has changed since then, and happily so. Driver behaviour in terms of seatbelt wearing has also changed dramatically. More needs to be done to change driver behaviour towards mobile phone use while driving and towards driving under the influence of drugs, but we also know that effective interventions on alcohol and seatbelts have saved lives. We must have the ambition to believe that Irish roads can be made safer through more changes in driver behaviour and more interventions by the State.

The figures are rising. Unfortunately, the trajectory is in the wrong direction. We need a new and urgent plan for ending road deaths and injuries, for ending the fear that many people, particularly vulnerable road users like cyclists, feel when going about their daily business. That is the context in which we in Labour have introduced this motion. The issue is being raised all around the country. Our local councillors, TDs and Senators in urban and rural areas alike are reporting significant concerns, anxiety and distress about road safety. The calls in our motion are among the many components that need to be tackled by the Government. Deputy Smith has mentioned the unjustifiable delays in getting tests for new drivers. Those tests are a very important component of road safety. I am glad to see the electric scooter regulations being introduced. They are long overdue and will be another important component of road safety.

In particular, our motion calls for greater enforcement of road traffic laws by the Garda, a matter that Deputy Smith discussed. We want to see a total rejigging of the Road Safety Authority's powers and capacity to recognise the pyramid of road users, prioritising the safety of vulnerable road users, in particular pedestrians and cyclists. We want to see the sharing of vital collision data by the RSA with local authorities so that our councils can build infrastructure to protect people. We want a national inspection programme for our roads and more funding for active travel infrastructure, road repairs, pavement maintenance, cycleways and staffing within local authorities. Driver behaviour and the state of our roads, coupled with poor enforcement, have left pedestrians and cyclists running the gauntlet while taking even the shortest of journeys. That threat is magnified for those travelling with children in buggies, for older people and for those with disabilities.

Yesterday, we marked annual bike week in the Oireachtas. We cycled around Leinster House with fellow Oireachtas cyclists. Even in the immediate vicinity of Leinster House, we observed how road defects and narrow cycle tracks made it difficult to navigate roads as a cyclist. We all know this; we see it all the time. People are driven by unsafe road surfaces out of cycle lanes and into the centre of the road.

Motorist behaviour contributes significantly to cyclists' risks. A video posted on X recently by a journalist, Mr. Peter Branigan, showed starkly the dangers cyclists face every day. It showed a cyclist coming through a junction I know well in Ranelagh in my constituency. It is the junction between Milltown Road and Sandford Road. In a 15-second video, we saw extraordinary obstacles and risks posed to cyclists by driver behaviour and poor road design. I hope that the cyclist involved is all right and any injuries are minor. Unfortunately, drivers turning out of driveways too quickly and drivers simply not seeing cyclists are the sorts of obstacle cyclists face constantly.

We often think of road safety as a competence of local authorities and the Garda. Clearly, more needs to be done to resource the Garda. It is time for the Government to take a stronger role. We have spoken about the trajectory going in the wrong direction. We have seen 73 traffic fatalities this year, each a human tragedy. That number obscures the countless others who have obtained what may be life-changing injuries on our roads. I have had recent discussions with cyclists who have suffered broken elbows, broken legs, dislocated shoulders and pelvic injuries. These were significant injuries that, in many cases, were brought about not only by poor driver behaviour, but also by poor road design, a lack of road maintenance and unsafe cycleways. These events are deeply traumatic for those who experience them. They are also traumatic for witnesses. My colleague, Deputy Duncan Smith, has sponsored an important Bill to criminalise the filming and sharing of videos of car crashes and other collisions. That legislation will be before the House in June and we want to see the Government supporting it. The most effective way to curtail the trauma of those videos circulating is to prohibit their circulation. Even more effective than that would be to eradicate these awful collisions in the first place. To view them as inevitable is to sanitise or ignore the reality of such collisions. We know that the vast majority of injuries and fatalities are preventable through the sorts of effective intervention that our motion outlines. We are all conscious of the sorts of injury that are caused by a lack of repair and maintenance of road surfaces, pavement surfaces and cycleways. We all know black spots in our constituencies and communities where people are injured, sometimes multiple times. Recently, a canvasser spoke to me about a woman who had been seriously injured after falling on a pavement in Ringsend that the council has still not repaired despite our seeking an intervention numerous times. We heard from other neighbours about how many other people had taken falls and been badly injured on the same stretch. We need to see stronger intervention by local authorities to make our roads, footpaths and cycleways safe, particularly where dangers have been identified and issues of road safety and pavement surfacing have already been brought to the authorities' attention.

In conclusion, I wish to speak to a particularly important component of our motion, namely, the need for data sharing by the RSA. This is a matter that Deputy Smith has raised numerous times in recent years. It was first drawn to my attention by our Labour candidate, Mr. Ciarán Ahern. We have become deeply frustrated because multiple parliamentary questions that we submitted to the Minister for Transport were either ruled out of order or only received cursory replies, farming out responsibility to the RSA.

We must see national accountability on this. I look forward to a substantive response from the Minister of State on this issue. As a lawyer, I cannot see how GDPR rules can prohibit the sharing of information with such a vitally important public policy purpose. As a public representative, I am frustrated that it has taken a "Prime Time" programme to spark any sort of political action on what is clearly a national political issue. How can we expect local authorities to make good planning decisions on road safety when they are going in with bad information? I received a parliamentary question response just today, stating that collision data collection is not even a statutory function of the Road Safety Authority. The recent negative coverage in the press has to lead to a rethink of how the RSA operates because, at present, it is not fulfilling its duty to safeguard road safety, road users, cyclists, pedestrians and all of us who use the roads.

Let this motion not be an occasion for Government TDs simply to list unsafe areas in their constituencies. Let this be a moment when the Government acts in response to our motion to make our roads safe once and for all, to end the carnage on our roads, and to take the sort of interventions that we have seen taken in the past to eradicate what were once thought of as inevitable human tragedies. There is nothing inevitable about road deaths or road injuries. We need to see action from the Government to stop these happening.

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