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

I thank the Labour Party for bringing forward this motion. We have discussed the issue of road safety many times in this House over the past number of months. To date this year, there have been 72 funerals of people who have died on our roads. People who have been seriously injured are probably a multiple of that, and the impact that has on communities is something that is very distressful and a really serious issue we need to get to grips with.

The reality is that we have always had a certain level of road deaths. That has come down in the past decade, and now we are seeing it creep back up again. It is not just creeping; it is actually flying back up again, and that is a serious problem we have to deal with. We also recognise that 70% of collisions happen on rural roads. That is something we also need to deal with because a lot of these rural roads have issues where there are multiple collisions happening on blind corners and junctions, and issues where there needs to be road works done to make them safer.

I had an example recently, which was Carns National School in County Sligo. It is a national school along the main road between Bundoran and Sligo town, and the side road goes off to where the school is. It is a blind junction with traffic travelling very fast. We have asked the local authority to look at it. The officials are saying that there have not been enough collisions on it to enable them to have safety works put in place, yet all the families who bring their children to school can see the danger. They recognise it every day. The teachers working in the school see the danger. I see the danger when I go there for 20 minutes and look at it, yet we have this situation where Transport Infrastructure Ireland does not see it because it has not had a report of enough collisions in order to take action.

There needs to be some level of recognising the reality and I have that in many communities up and down through my constituency. Communities come together where there is a stretch of road and they can see the danger, and they say it is only a matter of time until somebody is killed there. We wait and do very little until that actually happens. There needs to be an effort made to listen to people on the ground who are dealing with this on a regular basis.

Speed has been a major factor in a lot of these collisions and a lot of that speeding is happening because of intoxication, the use of drugs and all so on. We need greater enforcement and we need more gardaí out enforcing the rules of the road to ensure people obey them properly. That will only happen if we have the gardaí with the blue light flashing. The GoSafe van is fine and it serves a role but it is not a replacement for An Garda Síochána. That is the problem we have over the past decade or more, where a major part of the system has been privatised and given it to GoSafe, rather than giving it to the Garda. If the gardaí were on that stretch of road monitoring traffic, they would not just be monitoring speeding but everything else as well. They would notice a stolen car or where a car behaving suspiciously. They would watch out where there has been burglaries in an area, where farm machinery has been stolen or something like that. Gardaí are multifunctional in what they try to do. That is the difference, and there needs to be recognition of that.

Another issue we need to recognise is that technology has a role to play. This week we heard there are going to be traffic light cameras put in place in at two junctions but there is an issue with having the legislation in place to deal with that. This has been talked about for years. Why are we not in a situation where that legislation is not in place? The failures we see around all of these issues are contributing to the number of people being killed on our roads. Colleagues mentioned earlier the issue with the number of people who are driving continually while on a provisional licence, sometimes for years. Again, this is another issue that needs to be got to grips with, and I have raised this with the Minister of State previously.

We also have to recognise the driver training issue. Many of the people who are being killed on our roads and involved in these collisions are younger drivers. I met recently with members of the Professional Driving Instructors Association and I spoke to them about this. They told me that the number of mandatory lessons in Ireland is among the lowest in Europe and that there needs to be a review of the syllabus that is used for driver training. I know the Minister of State has spoken about that and has said that is going to happen but the RSA is sitting on these things for years. It has to take responsibility. It is not just an organisation that puts ads on the television. It has to do more than that. We need to hold it to book in respect of that and recognise that an awful lot of the things it is supposed to do are simply failing to be delivered on. It has to step up to the plate here and ensure that the funding it receives from Government is not just about advertising. It is also about putting measures in place that will actually save people's lives.

The issue of technology has also been mentioned, and I know the use of mobile phones and distracted driving is a very serious issue. In other jurisdictions, there is technology in the cab, particularly for fleet drivers, that watches the driver and ensures they are alarmed and alerted if a mobile phone is being used. We need to look at those types of situations as well. I was very alarmed to see this week where there were a number of garages and motor factors selling devices that can be plugged into a seat belt. If the person was not wearing their seat belt they could plug this in and the beeping would not be going on in the car. It circumvents a safety measure that is built into every car in the country.

We have issues here that we need to deal with and we need to take this very seriously because we cannot have a situation where more people are dying on our roads.

See this speech in context