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

I welcome the Minister of State to his new role and look forward to working with him. He and I get on well on a personal level, but where this matter is concerned, there are issues with policy and the fact that, in my view and that of many others, the Government’s commitment to provide the safety measures we need on our roads has not been followed through on adequately.

The Minister of State is correct to point out that speeding, intoxication and drivers getting distracted by, for example, using mobile phones are issues that continually arise in road traffic collisions and fatalities. We do not have the level of enforcement we need. The primary element of that enforcement is gardaí monitoring our roads and protecting the people on them. This is not about having speed cameras, which are a one-trick pony, but about having gardaí out monitoring the roads. We have not had enough of that for the past two decades or so. In the past decade, roads policing numbers have been cut and cut again. That serious matter is the core of this issue.

We have major problems with what used to be called accident black spots on many of our local and rural roads. There are many such areas in my constituency. All local authorities are looking for funding to work on them, but they cannot get the funding from the Government that they need to provide an adequate level of road maintenance and to ensure that safety measures are put in place at such locations.

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